Summary
Writing in the Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that Gen Z protests over exam fairness and institutional accountability [OPERATOR VERIFY: specific protest events referenced, e.g. Jharkhand student protests] are not just anti-government but a generational indictment - the post-liberalisation generation's "politics of accommodation," which favoured individual careers over collective mobilisation, allowed institutions to decay through thousands of small compromises.
WHY IN NEWS FOR UPSC & STATE PCS
Amid continuing student protests in Jharkhand and elsewhere over institutional accountability, exam fairness and jobs [OPERATOR VERIFY], commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued that these protests indict not just the current government but the entire post-liberalisation generation's strategy of "accommodation" - pursuing individual careers instead of collective action - which he says allowed institutions to hollow out from within.
Standard News
Whose Failure Is It, Really? TAN's position is that Pratap Bhanu Mehta is right
- the institutional decay driving Gen Z's protests cannot be pinned on any single government, because it was manufactured over decades by an entire generation's collective choice to opt out of collective action.
The Position
The easy explanation for India's institutional rot is political: a government captured regulators, packed appointments and let exam bodies fail. That explanation isn't wrong, but it's incomplete in a way that matters. Mehta's sharper claim is that the post-liberalisation generation - the one now parenting today's protesting students - made a specific, considered bet: that dispersed individual careers inside institutions would do more good than mass mobilisation outside them.
Millions of quiet professionals, not thousands of loud protesters, would be India's real engine of reform. That bet was not cowardice dressed up as strategy. It was a genuine theory of social change and for a generation, it looked plausible.
The Reasoning
The theory has a specific failure mode and it is visible in exactly the institutions Gen Z is protesting about. A public service commission does not get hollowed out by one minister in one term. It gets hollowed out when, year after year, competent people inside it make small accommodations - sign off on a questionable appointment rather than fight it, stay silent on a lowered standard rather than resign over it - because raising the alarm seemed less prudent than protecting one's own position and career.
Multiply that across universities, courts and newsrooms, over three decades and you get exactly what Gen Z is now protesting: institutions that still exist in form but no longer function as guarantees of fairness. The politics of accommodation didn't fail to prevent decay.
It was decay's actual mechanism.
The Strongest Counter
The most serious objection to this argument is that it lets the actual decision-makers off too lightly. Politics - specific ministers, specific appointments, specific policy choices to defund or politicize an institution - did the concrete damage.
A professor who quietly kept teaching well cannot be blamed in the same breath as a government that deliberately packed a regulatory board. Collapsing "the parents' generation" into one undifferentiated mass of complicity risks diluting responsibility that belongs, specifically and traceably, to those who held power and chose to abuse it.
Why the Position Still Holds
That objection is correct about degree, but not about kind. Political capture and generational accommodation are not competing explanations - they are a supply chain. A government that wants to hollow out an exam body needs thousands of quieter failures to succeed without resistance: officials who don't object, senior professionals who don't organize, institutions whose internal watchdogs stay silent because speaking up threatens a career built on accommodation.
Politics supplies the intent; accommodation supplies the permission. Naming the specific ministers who did specific damage is necessary - but it explains why decay was possible, not why it went this deep, for this long, with this little resistance from inside the institutions themselves.
Gen Z is, in effect, asking their parents' generation a question politics alone cannot answer: where were you, when it was happening in your own profession?
Quick Facts
Key numbers & takeaways — revise these first
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Author: Pratap Bhanu Mehta, contributing editor, The Indian Express [OPERATOR VERIFY].
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Protests referenced include ongoing student mobilisation in Jharkhand.
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Core demands cited: institutional accountability, fair exams, quality education, jobs.
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Key institutions named as weakened: universities, courts, public service commissions, regulatory bodies, newsrooms.
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:
Where exactly the counter-argument's own logic reveals its limit - not just that it's wrong, but why
The specific mechanism by which "accommodation" converts individual prudence into collective institutional failure
What kind of evidence would actually change TAN's position on how much blame belongs to politics versus complicity
How this argument extends beyond Gen Z protests to any institution currently asking "who let this happen"
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