10/05/2026
Asking citizens to reduce fuel consumption while travelling in 50-car convoys and private jets is not a policy failure. It is a character failure.
Leadership during crisis has one non-negotiable requirement: the person asking for sacrifice must be visibly sharing it. Not symbolically. Not on paper. Actually.
Lal Bahadur Shastri understood this. When India faced a food crisis in 1965, he didn't call a press conference first. He fasted — within his own home, quietly — and only then asked the nation to follow. That sequencing is everything. The sacrifice came before the speech. That is why India listened.
Today, the sequencing is reversed. The speech comes first. The sacrifice never follows.
Security convoys are not entirely optional — threat environments are real. But the scale, the private aircraft on domestic routes, the infrastructural excess of modern political power — these are choices. And when those choices remain untouched while citizens are asked to tighten their belts, the appeal doesn't just fall flat. It breeds contempt.
50 cars to deliver one message. The message was: save fuel.
The real damage isn't reputational. It's institutional. When people see no sacrifice at the top, they stop believing the crisis is real — or start believing the rules simply don't apply equally. That erosion of trust costs far more than any fuel saved.
Shastri didn't ask India to fast. He fasted — and then asked.
That is the difference between a directive and a movement.
