The Surat Demolition: Five Officers Suspended, One Commissioner Untouched

The Order Nobody Signed Picture the

position Sujal Prajapati was in on May 30. He is a mid-level engineer. His Commissioner, by his own later account submitted to a High Court, told him what to do - not on a file, not on a letterhead, but on WhatsApp. He carried it out.

A hundred families lost their homes. Six weeks later, it is Prajapati who is suspended and it is Prajapati who has had to go to court and produce his phone to prove he was not acting alone. The easy answer would be that Prajapati should simply have refused an order that lacked a written basis.

But sit with what that refusal would have cost him in the moment - a subordinate publicly defying a sitting Municipal Commissioner, with no paper trail to point to because the order itself left no paper trail. That is not weakness.

That is the precise trap that verbal instruction is designed to create: it asks the subordinate to absorb all the risk of an action while the person directing it absorbs none.

THE FRAMEWORK

This is not really a story about one illegal demolition. It is a story about plausible deniability as an administrative technique. A deontological reading is almost too easy here - Prajapati had a duty to insist on written authorisation before executing an action that would strip a hundred families of shelter, a right the Supreme Court tied to Article 21 four decades ago in Olga Tellis.

But a purely consequentialist reading complicates that judgment: an officer who refuses every verbal instruction in a system that runs substantially on verbal instruction does not survive in that system long enough to do any good.

The dilemma is not "follow orders or don't"

• it is what an individual officer owes to due process when the institution itself has not built the safeguards to make lawful action safe to perform.

THE RESOLUTION

Prajapati's decision to surface the WhatsApp messages - after the fact, under suspension, with everything already lost - is the right one and it should be read as such rather than as mere self-defence. The harder resolution is what this case demands going forward: institutional accountability cannot rest on a subordinate's willingness to leak his own phone six weeks after the damage is done.

That is not a safeguard, it is luck. The real cost the court has identified is precisely this - that "senior officers cannot be touched" while junior ones absorb suspension on an "indefinite" basis for executing what they were told to do.

Choosing to hold Nagarajan to the same standard as Prajapati costs the state political discomfort and an admission that its own oversight failed. Choosing not to costs something worse: it tells every officer below Commissioner rank that a verbal instruction from above is safer to obey than to question - the exact incentive that produced Nasirnagar in the first place.