The Blindness of Power and the Vision of Conscience

In classical Sanskrit political thought, the collapse of a kingdom was never seen as a sudden event. States did not fall merely because armies invaded their borders or because their economies weakened. Civilizations were believed to decay morally long before they collapsed politically. A kingdom first loses its ethical center, then its legitimacy, and only later its stability.

That ancient political wisdom resurfaced recently in Nepal’s Parliament when parliamentarian Mr. Ramesh Prasai quoted a Sanskrit shloka:

अत्यन्तक्रूरता लोभः
प्रजापीडनमेव च ।
एते दोषाः राज्ञस्तु
राज्यनाशाय कल्पते ॥

Its meaning remains starkly relevant even in modern democratic language:

Excessive cruelty, greed, and the oppression of the people are causes of a state’s downfall.

More interpretively, it suggests that when those in power grow indifferent to public suffering, they gradually erode the moral foundation that sustains political authority.

Mr. Prasai invoked this verse while referring to the September 8 and 9 Gen-Z protests in Nepal, where 76 people reportedly lost their lives and extensive damage was inflicted on public and private property. His warning was directed not only at the immediate crisis but also at something more structural: the possibility that repeated failures to respond across governments and political actors may deepen the distance between state and society.

However, it is important to place his intervention in its proper democratic context. This is a newly formed parliamentary alignment, still in the early stages of institutional adjustment. No government, regardless of intent, can be expected to resolve deep structural tensions in such a short time. Democratic repair is incremental, not instantaneous. In that sense, his remarks may be read less as a final judgment and more as a reminder of the moral attention required to rebuild trust during political transition.

What made the statement stand out was not only its content but also its tone. It did not resemble routine parliamentary rhetoric. It carried the weight of a warning.

Yet what lingered with me more than the speech itself was the speaker.

I watched a video of Mr. Prasai, who has been blind since birth, standing among hundreds of elected representatives in Parliament. The moment prompted an unsettling reflection on perception in contemporary politics.

It is tempting, and perhaps too simple, to say that he “sees” more than others. Still, this metaphor highlights how political systems can be blind to moral and social realities, prompting deeper reflection on perception within governance.

Perhaps the more precise distinction is as follows:

Eyesight is biological. Vision is interpretive.

Eyesight is biological, but true vision involves moral and cognitive engagement-recognizing suffering and institutional decay-highlighting the importance of moral attention in politics.

Modern political systems increasingly reward those who can navigate power rather than those who can interpret society. Over time, this fosters a quieter form of institutional blindness. Leaders become adept at reading political incentives while growing less attuned to social exhaustion. They learn to interpret alliances but not alienation. They master procedural governance but often lose sensitivity to lived experience.

This is not unique to Nepal. Many contemporary democracies show a widening gap between institutional language and public perception. The vocabulary of governance remains intact, but its emotional resonance weakens.

In Nepal, the gap between political language and lived experience exemplifies institutional blindness, making the metaphor of seeing versus perceiving more urgent and relevant.

Political transitions occur frequently, yet the governing culture changes more slowly. Coalition structures shift, but public trust does not necessarily recover in parallel. Political discourse continues to invoke “the people,” even as many citizens experience the state as distant from their daily lives.

The result is a peculiar form of democratic repetition: crisis, response, committee, accusation, reconfiguration, and then a renewed crisis. Each cycle produces language, but not always a transformation.

Meanwhile, social expectations evolve faster than political imagination does.

For many young Nepalis, migration is no longer solely an economic decision. It is increasingly tied to perceptions of opportunity, mobility, and institutional credibility. While this should not be reduced to a single cause, it suggests a broader sentiment: that meaningful futures are often imagined elsewhere.

When a society begins to associate aspiration more strongly with departure than with continuity, it signals a deeper emotional shift that no single policy can easily reverse.

At the same time, it would be misleading to interpret silence or departure as a uniform political rejection. Democracies often contain layers of disengagement, adaptation, and quiet endurance. Not every withdrawal is ideological, and not every critique is articulated publicly. The relationship between citizens and the state is more fragmented than any single explanation can capture.

Still, a pattern is worth noting. Public discourse often emphasizes progress and transition, while lived experience often registers uncertainty and fatigue. It is within this tension that questions of legitimacy gradually emerge.

Legitimacy, in this sense, is not only procedural but also emotional. It depends on whether citizens feel seen, heard, and taken seriously by the institutions that claim to represent them.

When that sense weakens, democratic systems may continue functioning formally while losing something less visible yet equally important: moral credibility. Restoring this credibility requires collective effort and moral awareness, underscoring the responsibility of citizens and leaders alike to sustain trust and legitimacy.

The Sanskrit verse invoked in Parliament speaks to this dimension of political life. It reflects an older intuition that governance cannot rely indefinitely on procedure alone. When authority becomes associated with indifference, or when public suffering fails to register meaningfully in decision-making structures, the foundations of stability begin to weaken.

This does not mean collapse is imminent or inevitable. Historical outcomes are rarely linear. But it does suggest that legitimacy requires constant renewal, not mere assumption.

In Nepal today, the deeper challenge may not be the absence of political activity but the repetition of political activity without a corresponding renewal of trust.

Citizens continue to hear promises of change, reform, and stability. Yet many also experience a gap between rhetoric and results. Over time, this gap can produce something more corrosive than anger: resignation.

Resignation does not always announce itself loudly. It often appears as withdrawal, irony, or lowered expectations. In this sense, silence should not be mistaken for stability.

Within this landscape, Mr. Prasai’s parliamentary intervention carries symbolic weight, even if it should not be overinterpreted. It briefly interrupts the routine cadence of political speech and reintroduces a moral vocabulary that contemporary governance sometimes struggles to sustain.

But it is also important to avoid turning individual figures into metaphors that carry more weight than they can reasonably bear. No single parliamentarian, regardless of personal circumstances, embodies clarity or blindness in a complete sense. What matters more is the system in which all actors operate and what it enables or obscures.

The deeper issue is structural: political systems often prioritize survival, negotiation, and continuity. These are necessary functions of democracy. Yet when survival becomes the dominant value, perception itself can narrow. Institutions begin to respond to themselves rather than to society.

In such conditions, citizens may remain represented in a procedural sense while feeling less represented in an experiential sense. Elections and speeches continue, and institutions remain formally intact. Yet the emotional relationship between state and society grows increasingly fragile.

This is where the metaphor of blindness is most relevant, not as a personal condition but as an institutional risk.

Real blindness in politics is not the absence of sight. It is the gradual inability to recognize what is consistently visible yet no longer fully acknowledged.

No democracy is immune to this risk. But democracies remain resilient only if they retain the capacity for self-recognition.

The Sanskrit political tradition understood this long before modern institutions emerged. It recognized that a state’s decline begins not with an external threat but with the internal erosion of ethical attention.

In contemporary Nepal, the most pressing question may not be whether the state is strong or weak, stable or unstable. It may be whether it still has the capacity to see its own people clearly, without distortion, distraction, or distance.

And perhaps that is the unsettling significance of the moment. Not that a blind parliamentarian appears to “see” more than others, but that his presence forces a more difficult question on the system itself:

What does it mean when a democracy loses sight of what it claims to represent?

Author Subedi is a Professor of Medical Sociology at Miami University, USA.