When suffering becomes functional

When suffering becomes useful, justice becomes expendable. Across governance, markets, and institutions, pain is quietly metabolised to preserve hierarchy and control. Understanding this hidden mechanics reveals not despair—but the subtle cracks through which dignity can quietly reclaim power.

In contemporary India, suffering is no longer merely endured—it is systematically absorbed, normalised, and rendered functional. From polluted air and unsafe infrastructure to bureaucratic discretion and moral intermediaries, pain has become the quiet fuel that stabilises power. This essay examines how injustice persists not through villainy, but through efficiency—and why dignity, not rebellion, poses the greatest threat to entrenched authority.

In everyday experience of governance, suffering is rarely treated as failure. More often, it is absorbed, rationalised, and quietly normalised. Accidents, polluted air, unsafe infrastructure, and regulatory lapses are discussed as unfortunate but inevitable. Yet this inevitability is manufactured. Suffering persists not because it is invisible, but because it is functional.

Across sectors, concentrated power reveals itself most clearly through daily risk. Restaurants operate without oversight until tragedy strikes. Highways and railways accept fatalities as collateral. Aviation, once a symbol of institutional competence, exposes stress fractures under opaque regulation and corporate consolidation. These are not isolated breakdowns; they form a pattern shaped by corporate–bureaucratic collusion and fragmented accountability.

The consequences seep into ordinary life. Delhi’s toxic air, water contamination in Indore, and chronic civic failure in Gurugram are not anomalies but symptoms. Urban design erases pedestrians and cyclists. Adulterated food and counterfeit medicines circulate even through reputed supply chains. Health systems tilt sharply towards private care accessible only to the affluent. Ordinary citizens navigate illness, precarity, and bureaucratic vulnerability as a permanent condition, not an exception.

Faith, obedience, and dependence become survival strategies. Intermediaries—fixers, godmen, informal brokers—flourish not because people are foolish, but because institutional reliability has been deliberately hollowed out. As Arundhati Roy observed, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” Suffering is tolerated not because it is unseen, but because it does not disrupt power.

The most destabilising force in such a system is not rebellion, but reliability. Predictable clinics, transparent bureaucracies, and schools that function without discretion flatten hierarchies. They reduce dependence and strip intermediaries of relevance. This is why “boring” competence is resisted. Uncertainty creates leverage. Discretion sustains authority. Partial delivery keeps citizens compliant.

Hardship is often framed as character-building—a moral alibi for those who survived it, and a justification for its continuation. B.R. Ambedkar’s insight remains instructive: “Caste is not just a division of labour but a division of labourers.” The logic extends beyond caste. Any system that withholds floor-level security relies on hierarchy to reproduce itself.

The most unsettling truth is this: justice does not fail when people suffer; it fails when suffering becomes useful. Pain stops being a glitch and becomes fuel—a lubricant that keeps systems stable. No conspiracies are required. Power behaves like an organism, preserving continuity over compassion. As George Orwell warned, “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” Expectations are reshaped quietly, teaching people what to endure and when to remain silent.

Road deaths become statistics. Pollution sustains industrial convenience. Religious intermediaries thrive where public provision collapses. In every domain, if removing suffering would destabilise hierarchy, reform is resisted automatically. Inquiries fade. Outrage exhausts itself. The metabolism of pain is simply too efficient.

Yet clarity produces resilience. Justice need not arrive as spectacle. It often emerges through quiet withdrawal—reducing dependence, refusing compliance, insisting on dignity where the system does not anticipate it. Simone Weil captured this precisely: “The oppressed can only gain liberation by being relieved from the necessity of paying attention to the oppression of others.” When survival no longer consumes all attention, people disengage from injustice—not dramatically, but decisively.

The question is not whether suffering exists, but whether it is allowed to be useful. To render pain unprofitable, to remove fear as leverage, to normalise dignity as a baseline rather than a reward, is to enact a quiet structural revolution. Such a change does not announce itself. It accumulates. And when suffering ceases to fuel power, power is forced to adapt. 

(The writer is a retired officer of the Indian Information Service and a former Editor-in-Charge of DD News and AIR News (Akashvani), India’s national broadcasters, as well as Media-link Information Officer of Press Information Bureau (PIB) attached to various ministries. He has also worked as an international media consultant with UNICEF Nigeria and contributes regularly to various publications in India and abroad.)