India, Feb. 23 -- A citizen is not a petitioner. That sentence should be unnecessary in a functioning republic. Yet it captures the daily experience of millions: For small, ordinary things, people must plead, follow up, return, escalate, and wait. The system behaves like a favour economy. Outcomes arrive not through predictable process, but through persistence, connections, or exhaustion. Delay does not merely inconvenience. It slowly erodes dignity and momentum. And when routine services demand repeated requests, the republic quietly converts citizenship into supplication.

The deeper indignity is what governance failure forces the citizen to become. Not merely a petitioner, but a crusader for the routine. The individual ends up doing wh...