When Airline becomes monopoly

Passengers become Pawns

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There comes a moment in the life of any nation when a monopoly forgets that it is a service, not a sovereign.

IndiGo, long celebrated as India’s tireless workhorse of the skies has now discovered the perilous edge of its own supremacy. Commanding nearly 60% of domestic traffic, the airline once basked in the aura of reliability; today, that very dominance has become the country’s softest pressure point. For four tumultuous days, India witnessed a spectacle that should never repeat itself: an aviation giant staggering under its own weight, triggering a chain reaction of chaos. Hundreds of flights vanished from departure boards. Airports turned into holding camps of fatigue and frustration. Fares soared to absurd altitudes. And the familiar hum of the nation’s air travel machinery collapsed into disarray.

When one carrier becomes the spine of an entire system, even a minor fracture sends tremors through the national grid. IndiGo, “too big to fail,” suddenly appeared “large enough to paralyse,” reminding every traveller, every parent clutching a child, every student racing toward an exam, every worker praying not to miss a crucial job interviewthat convenience is fragile when choice is an illusion. India deserves more than cosmetic regret and templated corporate remorse. What the country needs is candour, not selective disclosures, but a full and unvarnished explanation of how a crisis with five months of advance notice detonated in the final week like an unmonitored fuse.