Power Without Accountability: Why Policy by Decree Is Failing India

 

Power Without Accountability: Why Policy by Decree Is Failing India

Hindi Version: https://rakeshinsightfulgaze.blogspot.com/2025/12/blog-post_63.html

Over the past decade, one pattern has become impossible to ignore. The Bharatiya Janata Party government has spent far more time undoing, renaming, and centralizing policies of previous governments than creating new, people-centered reforms of its own. Existing programs are repackaged, authority is pulled tightly into Delhi, and institutional checks are steadily weakened.

What remains absent is a single transformative policy that clearly and measurably improves the lives of ordinary Indians.

Instead, the government relies on polarization to govern. Religious identity is repeatedly weaponized. Muslims and Christians are portrayed as threats, while dissent is branded anti-national. This strategy keeps emotions high and scrutiny low, allowing major decisions to be pushed through without debate. Centrally driven policies, passed with minimal discussion, are opaque by design and dangerously easy to exploit.

Audit data confirms the cost. Reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India for 2022 and 2023 point to more than ₹20 lakh crore in public spending that is either unaccounted for or wildly overspent. Projects inflate far beyond reasonable costs. Money meant for healthcare, infrastructure, food security, and welfare disappears without consequence. Oversight exists on paper, but enforcement is deliberately absent.

Now the government is attempting to dilute MNREGA, the rural employment guarantee scheme introduced by the Indian National Congress. MNREGA guarantees 100 days of work and sets a wage floor that prevents exploitation. It gives rural laborers leverage in a market stacked against them.

If the proposed changes are genuinely better, there should be nothing to hide.

Why not place the policy before the Parliament of India, allow real debate, and explain how the new framework improves lives? That is not obstruction. That is democracy.

Instead, debate is sabotaged. Sessions are disrupted. Decisions are centralized. Policies are altered through force of numbers rather than force of argument.

At this point, responsibility no longer rests with the Prime Minister alone.

Leaders like Nitish Kumar and N. Chandrababu Naidu are not powerless spectators. They are kingmakers. As central pillars of the National Democratic Alliance, they have the numbers to stop this government in its tracks.

They choose not to.

By continuing to support Narendra Modi without conditions, they share full responsibility for what follows. This is not strategic patience. It is deliberate surrender of democratic duty.

There are only two explanations for such behavior: fear or greed. Both are fatal to democracy.

Fear allows authoritarianism to grow unchecked. Greed normalizes it. Whether leaders stay silent to protect themselves from investigation or to preserve power and privilege makes little difference to the people suffering the consequences. The outcome is the same: unchecked authority, hollow institutions, and a Parliament reduced to noise.

Claims of “influencing from within” have long collapsed under scrutiny. There has been no meaningful resistance to executive overreach, no defense of parliamentary norms, no pushback against the misuse of investigative agencies, and no protection of federalism. Influence that produces nothing is not influence. It is covered.

What we are witnessing is not helplessness. It is a choice.

The decay is visible inside Parliament itself. Opposition voices are shouted down. Debate is replaced with chaos. The Speaker enables disorder. The Prime Minister delivers scripted monologues and exits without engagement. Leaders like Rahul Gandhi are attacked personally rather than confronted on policy.

The price is paid by those with the least power.

Rural workers, daily wage earners, and marginalized communities lose protections. Public money meant for them vanishes. Programs that offered dignity are weakened. Corruption thrives where debate is crushed.

Democracy does not die only at the hands of those who openly attack it. It dies faster when those who could stop the damage decide it is safer or more profitable to remain silent.

Those who have the power to bring down an unaccountable government and refuse to act are not innocent. They are enablers. And history does not excuse enablers.

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