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Ask the simplest question about the paper leak that helped set off the protests at Jantar Mantar, and you run into a wall almost immediately: who, exactly, is responsible? Not in the vague sense – everyone agrees “the system failed” – but in the specific sense that matters to a citizen. Who made the policy? Which official signed off on the printing contract? Which agency was supposed to guard the exam centre, and did they? Has anyone actually lost their job over it? In most functioning democracies, a failure of this scale – millions of young people’s futures disrupted by a security breach that should never have happened – would trigger a resignation, a named inquiry, a public report with consequences attached to it. In India, it triggers a press statement, perhaps a low-level arrest, and then silence. Nobody at the top answers for it, because nobody at the top is actually built to.

Then came the second question, and it arrived with batons rather than words. When students gathered peacefully to ask the first question, the police response was not explanation but force – visuals that have circulated widely of unarmed protesters being beaten, dragged, and detained by unnamed policemen and ununiformed goons. And here too, the same wall appears. Who authorised this? Which officer will be held to account for it? Is there anywhere a citizen can go, outside of the police’s own internal machinery, to get a straight answer? Overwhelmingly, the answer is no.

These two proximate moments – an administrative failure nobody owns, and a policing failure nobody answers for – look like separate scandals. They are not. They are the same scandal, wearing two faces. And if the Jantar Mantar movement is to mean anything beyond this news cycle, it has to name that scandal properly: India does not have a functioning system of public accountability, and it never really built one.

To understand why, we have to go back further than 2014, when it began dismantling whatever had remained of the republic – further than any particular government – all the way to the moment India became independent, and to a choice the country made, almost without noticing it was making one.

A machine built to answer upward, not downward

Colonial administration in India was never designed to answer to Indians. That was not an oversight or an imperfection in an otherwise sound system – it was the entire point. The British built, over nearly two centuries, an extraordinarily effective machine for extracting revenue, maintaining order, and controlling a vast population with a comparatively tiny administrative and police force. Every part of that machine was built to answer upward – to the governor-general, to the secretary of state for India, ultimately to the Crown and Parliament in London – and never downward, to the people it governed.

The district collector did not need the consent of the villagers whose land revenue he assessed. The police did not need the trust of the community they patrolled. Their job was to keep the empire’s peace and the empire’s books balanced, and their careers depended entirely on their superiors’ satisfaction with how well they did that, not on any verdict handed down by the governed.

This is not incidental history. It is the design logic baked into every institution the British left behind – the civil service, the police, the systems of secrecy and discretion that surrounded government decision-making – and it is the logic India inherited almost entirely intact.

Consider the police. The framework that still substantially governs Indian policing today, the Police Act of 1861, was drafted in the direct aftermath of the 1857 uprising, with one explicit purpose: to prevent anything like it from happening again. It created a force whose chain of command ran to the executive – to the district magistrate, to the provincial government – and nowhere........

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