Mainstream WeeklySonam Wangchuk- a renowned innovator, reformist educator, environmental conservationist and also the Magsaysay Award winner- has been sitting on a hunger strike demanding the resignation of union education minister, Dhramendra Pradhan, a demand that in the first place shouldn’t have required any effort at all. It should have been the outcome once the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test(NEET) question paper was leaked again this year. Lakhs of students felt cheated, were out on the roads protesting, calling for the minister’s resignation, which never came. Fourteen students took their own lives in despair and desperation as their hard work and dreams came crashing down.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) has failed miserably in conducting these exams in a fair manner. This has happened repeatedly over the years and yet there seems to be no accountability. Neither the NTA chairperson nor the education minister have resigned till now. A democratic polity is hinged on the premise of accountability to citizens which requires people in authority to give answers for failures and accept responsibility for them. In literature on governance, one often comes across two essential aspects of accountability: answerability and enforcement. Answerability refers to the obligation of public authorities to provide explanations for their actions and enforcement ensures that wrongdoing is met with appropriate sanctions or corrective measures/ punishments. Both of them together provide a meaningful framework of accountability. Answerability without the possibility of punishment or other consequences is considered to be a weak and partial form of it. Far from the full accountability, even the basics of it in terms of providing answerability for the paper leaks seems to be missing for the authorities have failed to provide satisfactory explanations and fix responsibility for the fiasco that has unfolded over last few years in context of the exams conducted by the NTA. As Jonathan Fox (2007) wrote exploring the relationship between transparency and accountability, “If the power of transparency is based on the ‘power of shame’, then its influence over the really shameless could be quite limited”. Transparency is necessary but not sufficient to produce accountability. Here, papers are leaked every year, investigations go on but the government refuses to even acknowledge the failure, forget being transparent about it and overhaul the NTA’s flawed model of working. Apparently, the government doesn’t even feel ashamed of its continuing failures to properly and fairly conduct a national level eligibility entrance test.
The ‘power of shame’ works only in a moral framework where a government sees its role as subservient to the needs and wishes of people who have elected them to power. And that is why Mahatma Gandhi believed politics without any ethical principles is of no use to humanity. For Gandhi, politics had to be based upon the principles of truth, non-violence and service to society. These Gandhian principles might sound unreal today but without some of these, politics and governance can lose it way to become only a means to sustain sections of elites in power and society. The complete silence of the government on Wangchuk’s fast in Delhi, which is based upon the Gandhian principle of satyagraha, reflects not only a lack of transparency, answerability and ultimately evasion of accountability by the government but more importantly, it also shows a deep erosion of morality in Indian politics. Satyagraha was premised on the idea of a shared humanity, that we all have a capacity to respond to call for justice, suffering had a moral force that could awaken the conscience of even your adversary.
Gandhi’s satyagraha moved the British Empire to engage with the demands of the Indian national movement. Troublingly, our own elected government is not only unmoved but seems unwilling to engage with him or the students who are leading this movement for accountability. Such indifference to a peaceful fast undertaken on behalf of the lakhs of students of this country marks a profound failure of both democratic accountability and political morality.
(Author: Dr. Preeti Chauhan, Faculty, Dept.of Political Science, Lakshmibai College, University of Delhi)