When Corrupt Power Becomes Culture

by Priyanka Lugani

“In the age of Kali, dharma will decline, strife and quarrel will increase, and virtue will be forgotten.” — Mahabharata, Shanti Parva

We live in such a time. The system prefers sleep, because when people are asleep, corruption thrives.

Corrupt power in society does not always roar. It whispers. It distracts. It exhausts. It convinces you that resistance is futile and that silence is dignified. It suggests survival is more practical than justice. And so the cycle continues.

Let us look at the names we remember, and the many we have already forgotten. Ruchika Girhotra. Ankita Bhandari. Jyoti Singh, known to the nation as Nirbhaya.

Each case became a headline. Each became an outrage. Each carried the promise: This will change everything. Did it?

Justice, when it arrives, often comes exhausted, delayed, diluted. In the case of Rupan Deol Bajaj versus K. P. S. Gill, a legal victory came only after years of persistence. The punishment itself remained insignificant within the larger architecture of power. Symbolic, yes. Revolutionary, no.

The system rarely transforms itself. It protects itself.

And what of the countless unnamed women whose cases never trend? The police require influence, the legal system requires stamina, and protection often depends on status, wealth, or connections. For the ordinary person, justice becomes a second battle layered upon the first trauma.

We are told to have faith in institutions—that they exist to restore dignity. But what happens when the very structures designed to protect begin to feel hollow, like performances of authority without integrity?

Corrupt power is not only individual. It is systemic, cultural, and psychological.

The Culture of Indifference in Corrupt Power

There is something more dangerous than overt violence: indifference.

We have grown comfortable looking away. We scroll past brutality. We whisper about injustice. Silence is advised for the sake of reputation.

“If you speak publicly, it will bring shame.”
“Why can’t you just accept it?”
“Think about the family.”

Why is silence considered dignified, but truth disruptive?

Indifference stabilizes dysfunction. Indifference to evil becomes participation in it. Indifference slowly becomes adharma—a drift away from moral responsibility.

Why should anyone endure narcissistic abuse, manipulation, or violence quietly? Is it not a fundamental human right to speak and seek justice? Or has the collective psyche become so distorted that victims are conditioned to internalise blame?

Corrupt power relies not only on perpetrators, but on bystanders to exist. Collectively, we prefer to live with vital lies, because they keep us in a state of comfort and illusion. Why confront an uncomfortable truth?

Within corrupt power in society, “hush money”—better known as settlements—is offered to victims. This construct is designed to silence, to appease, and to protect the abuser, allowing harmful behaviour to continue behind a socially acceptable mask.

But settlements rarely restore dignity. Instead, they reinforce impunity. When consequences remain minor, corruption learns it can persist safely. Systems rarely decay through dramatic collapse; they decay through quiet compromise.

The Epidemic of the Psyche

Open social media and one word echoes repeatedly: narcissist.
The term trends because something deeper is unfolding. We are witnessing a relational crisis. Deception appears more common than integrity, and manipulation more visible than mutual respect.

There is a disturbance in how we relate to one another—particularly in how society relates to women. Violence against women is not merely behavioural; it is cultural conditioning shaped by corrupt power.

It is reinforced through media, cinema, music, and peer groups. Archetypes shift, and idols change. Figures who equate dominance with strength gather enormous followings, and films that aestheticise aggression blur the line between power and cruelty.

What is repeatedly fed into the psyche eventually normalises itself. When violence becomes entertainment, desensitisation follows. When misogyny becomes humour, dignity erodes.

The war is systemic. The battles are interpersonal.

Corrupt Power and the Loss of Dharma in Society

At its core, corrupt power is power severed from responsibility.

Institutions were created to uphold human dignity—to provide protection and structure. Law was meant to follow moral clarity, not replace it. When law becomes transactional, when influence outweighs ethics, trust erodes and safety begins to feel like an illusion.

This dilemma is not confined to one nation. But within societies that speak of dharma—of cosmic balance—the imbalance feels especially stark. A society out of balance is not in dharma.

When women and men feel collectively unsafe, regardless of wealth, education, or status, something foundational has fractured. When independence is reframed as immorality and dignity becomes conditional, we are not witnessing isolated failures but structural imbalance.

We need institutions rooted in ethics rather than image, and leadership resistant to influence rather than shaped by it. Cultural transformation requires valuing integrity over dominance.

Corrupt power is not dismantled by rage alone. It yields to sustained clarity, courage, and moral pressure.

Safety may not exist outside us, but solidarity can. Perhaps this is the generational task before us: to refuse indifference, to confront systemic decay without becoming consumed by it, and to choose honour in struggle over comfort in dishonour.

Because corrupt power survives in silence.

Silence, eventually, becomes complicity.