Topic 23 of 25
Opinion Accountability and the Passive Voice in Governance Institutional Accountability - Naming Responsibility in Public Policy and Ethics

Zero. That's the number of named individuals held responsible in almost every op-ed written about India's air pollution. Cities "flood." Papers "leak." Deadlines get "extended." Nobody, apparently, does any of it.

| | Source: The Indian Express | Topic 23 of 25

Summary

Writing in The Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that Indian governance increasingly evades accountability by stripping the grammatical subject out of its own sentences - describing failures as things that "happen" rather than things specific people did.

He connects Sonam Wangchuk's hunger strike demanding a minister's resignation over exam leaks to philosopher Raymond Geuss's observation that Hillary Clinton's language on Gaza mysteriously lost its subject at the exact moment responsibility should have appeared.

Mehta extends this to Indian environmental governance, where repeated extensions of pollution-control deadlines happen without any named policymaker ever explaining why.

WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS

Sonam Wangchuk's hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, demanding Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation over exam leaks, prompted Mehta's reflection on how modern governance uses anonymising language - "The System," "The Bureaucracy," "Norms" - to describe decisions that were, in fact, made by specific people. He draws a parallel to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change's repeated relaxation of deadlines for coal power plants to install Flue Gas Desulphurisation units, originally due in 2017 and still not enforced.

Standard News

The Sentence Without a Subject

The Position

Passive constructions in governance - "it happens," "deadlines were extended," "cities flooded"

  • are not neutral language. They are a governing technology, deliberately or not, for evading accountability. When a sentence about a policy failure has no named subject, democratic politics loses the one thing it actually needs to function: someone to answer for the decision.

The Reasoning

Consider what actually happens when a coal plant's Flue Gas Desulphurisation (FGD) deadline gets extended. It is never reported as "Minister X decided to extend the deadline because of Y." It is reported as "the deadline has been extended"

  • a sentence that describes an outcome while erasing the person who produced it. First set in 2017, these deadlines have now stretched toward 2026-2027, each extension issued through language that names no one. This matters because accountability requires a subject before it can require an answer. You cannot ask "why did you decide this?" of "The System." Pratap Bhanu Mehta's essay draws the sharpest version of this point from philosopher Raymond Geuss: when Hillary Clinton described Gaza's conditions - "reconstruction frozen, investment absent"
  • her sentences lost their grammatical subject at precisely the moment a subject was needed. Sonam Wangchuk's hunger strike, demanding a specific minister's resignation over exam leaks, is read here not as excessive but as a defence of the basic proposition that institutions can only be repaired once someone is named as having broken them.

The Strongest Counter-Argument

The most serious objection is not that this critique is wrong, but that it underestimates the real cost of naming names. In diplomacy, refusing to assign individual blame - speaking of "developments" rather than "decisions," "conditions" rather than "actions taken"

  • can be what keeps a fragile negotiation alive. And a culture of aggressive individual naming and shaming has its own well-documented harms: it can be weaponised, disproportionate and cruel to people who made defensible calls under real constraints. Not every policy failure has a villain; sometimes genuine, good-faith actors made reasonable decisions that turned out badly and demanding a name to blame can punish competence as readily as negligence.

Why the Position Still Holds

This objection is strongest when applied to genuinely ambiguous international diplomacy, where naming can escalate conflict. But it proves far less than it seems to in domestic governance cases like the FGD deadlines. Here, the identity of the decision-maker is not diplomatically sensitive - it is simply not published.

There is no comparable "civility" cost to saying which ministry official signed off on which extension and why; the anonymity serves institutional comfort, not any genuine diplomatic or humanitarian interest. The counter-argument's real force lives in the exceptional case (a live negotiation, a cruelty risk)

  • but the FGD deadlines, exam leaks and most everyday governance failures Mehta describes are not that case. The default should be a named subject; the burden should fall on showing why this specific decision genuinely needs anonymity, not the reverse. (This is the free preview. The complete piece - including where naming genuinely does more harm than good and TAN's full institutional position - is in Deep Analysis.)

Quick Facts

  • Sonam Wangchuk held an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar demanding accountability over exam paper leaks. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change regulates coal-fired power plant emission norms, including Flue Gas Desulphurisation deadlines first set in 2017.

    The Supreme Court, in Alembic Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. Rohit Prajapati (2020), held that post-facto environmental clearances violate the precautionary principle.

Beyond The Headlines
Opinion Institutional Accountability - Naming Responsibility in Public Policy and Ethics

Connect the dots for your UPSC preparation.

Standard news covers the event. Log in to read our comprehensive analysis and uncover the hidden constitutional, structural, and ethical dimensions of this topic:

1

The specific test TAN proposes for telling apart legitimate diplomatic discretion from convenient bureaucratic anonymity

2

Why the FGD deadline extensions are actually a harder case for Mehta's argument than the exam-leak example and how the piece resolves that

3

TAN's full engagement with the "cult of personality" objection - that blaming Modi or Trump personally is itself a form of accountability evasion

4

The specific institutional reform TAN's position points toward, beyond just "name more people"

Included in this analysis

Deep Analysis Sharpens your Mains-level understanding.
8 Languages Read the news comfortably in your language.
PYQ Connection Direct connection with previous year Mains questions.
Expected Questions Possible upcoming questions for Prelims & Mains.
Daily Evaluation Daily Prelims test, plus category-wise Mains evaluation.
Mentor Observation Daily, topic-wise expert feedback on your tests.
Value Additions Important Case Studies and daily Vocab Word.

Join thousands of aspirants analyzing the news deeply.

Log In to Read Full Article
Institutional Accountability Passive Voice Sonam Wangchuk Flue Gas Desulphurisation RTI Act Ecologically Sensitive Zones Governance Ethics

More from 18 Jul 2026

Short titles by category — open any story to read it fully.

GS Paper 1
Society - Aata-Saata Custom, Section 13(1) Injunctions, PCMA 2006 Enforcement What actually stops a marriage that an entire village has already agreed to, that two families have already planned for, that a priest has probably already been booked for? Not a leaflet campaign. Not a school lecture on the legal age of marriage. In Sikar this week, the answer was a single sheet of paper signed by a magistrate - issued before a single ritual could begin. Society - Women's Mobility, Induced Demand, Kerala's Priyadarshini Scheme A state transport corporation losing more money on a route is not usually good news. In Kerala this week, it was presented as proof of success - because the passengers filling those seats had never travelled on that route before at all. Culture - Bharat Ratna, Padma Awards, Regional Representation & Ceremonial Timing Two names, Sivaji Ganesan and M.S. Viswanathan, never won the one award their careers were built toward [OPERATOR VERIFY: award history for both names]. Not because their work fell short of it. Because the moment never arrived when it would have looked, to whoever was deciding, like the right time to give it. Society - Leaky Pipeline in Architecture, Council of Architecture Leadership, Historical Erasure of Women Architects Perin Jamsetjee Mistri ran her own architecture firm for fifty years, designing everything from Art Deco bungalows to hospitals across two continents. Most architecture students in India today have never heard her name.
GS Paper 2
Article 82, 42nd & 84th Constitutional Amendments, Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill 2026 Two states with equal populations today could walk away from the next delimitation exercise with very different numbers of Lok Sabha seats - the only variable being how aggressively each one curbed its birth rate decades ago. VBSA Bill 2025, Entry 66 Union List, UGC Act 1956, Institutional Autonomy What happens to academic freedom when the body that funds, accredits and penalises a university becomes the same body? Anti-Radicalisation Cells, Articles 14 15 25, Behavioural Indicator Policing A cell built to prevent radicalisation risks radicalising the very communities it profiles by treating faith as evidence. US-Iran Escalation, Houthi Proxy Threat, Maritime Chokepoint Vulnerability More than 35 dead, over 300 wounded and a single strait that carries a fifth of the world's oil. Strait of Hormuz Crisis - DGMA Seafarer Advisory and Energy Import Exposure Somewhere on a tanker crossing Hormuz right now is an Indian seafarer whose employer just got told not to send anyone else there again. BIMSTEC National Security Chiefs Meeting - Maritime Law Enforcement and HADR Guidelines A cyclone-hit fishing fleet from three BIMSTEC countries needing rescue in the same stretch of the Bay of Bengal - that is exactly what this week's guidelines were built for. Article 324 and the Precedent Chain from Bihar SIR to Tamil Nadu SIR Once the Election Commission wins this argument, does it ever have to have it again?
GS Paper 3
Skyroot's Vikram-1 Orbital Test and India's Space Sector Liberalisation A private Indian company is attempting, on its first full orbital try, what ISRO took decades to perfect. WPI-CPI Pass-Through and the RBI's Rate-Cut Dilemma Wholesale fuel inflation near 30 per cent takes months to reach your bill; retail breaching target now is that delay catching up. Tiered Subsidies, Land Risk and the Shift Toward Chip Design A fabless chip startup founder gets government backing for the idea but has to find the land money entirely alone. Specified Non-Financial Assets and the Closed Backdoor A defaulting promoter used to walk back years later and buy their old factory back cheap - that door just closed. Weight-Adjustment Curves and Carbon Neutrality Factors in CAFE-III Why would a car-emissions rule care how much ethanol a farmer's sugarcane produces? Algorithmic Censorship and AI Alignment The same chatbot that will happily draft a pamphlet criticising a sitting American president suddenly finds nothing to say about the king of Thailand or the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. That is not a coincidence and it is not a bug either. Drone-Based Sample Transport and Last-Mile Healthcare Access Ninety-nine per cent of what a rural TB diagnosis used to cost a patient wasn't the test itself - it was the bus fare, the missed wages and the day lost travelling to a lab that could actually run it.
GS Paper 4
Article 21 Paternalism versus Article 19 Right to Protest On the nineteenth day without food, the question stops being about policy and becomes whether the state will even talk to the person starving to be heard. Dignity in Incarceration and Time-Bound Remission Policy Picture a prisoner in his eighties, terminally ill, still serving a sentence a decade after he stopped being any threat to anyone.
Editorial
Critical Information Infrastructure Protection - Third-Party Vendor Risk and Breach Disclosure Norms If the reactor itself was never touched, why should a leak from its contractor still worry you? Fourteen point three gigabytes of files tied to the Kudankulam plant sat on a ransomware leak site for over a month before any authority in New Delhi said a word about it. US Section 301/122 Tariffs, Forced Labour Clause and India's Energy-Trade Balancing Strategy India is fighting one set of American tariffs while quietly paying to avoid another it hasn't even been charged yet. Contesting a 12.5 per cent forced-labour tariff with one hand, it is signing a first-ever LPG import deal with the other - and both moves belong to the same strategy.
Essay
Regulatory Design for Private Investment in Healthcare Outcomes and Education Supply A parent stretching to pay a private school fee has no way of knowing if that school is actually any good - and neither does the regulator. A patient signing into a corporate hospital bed is in exactly the same position, for a completely different reason.
Ethics
Institutional Self-Audit vs Reputational Risk in Religious Trusts Twenty tonnes of silver, valued at roughly Rs 550 crore, go in for melting - and only about a twentieth of it turns out to be real. Somewhere between the donation box and the government mint, either the devotees were deceived or the custodians were.

← Back to all Current Affairs