The Crisis of Governance: Ruled, Not Served

 

Recently, Amit Shah, the honourable Home Minister, while addressing a book launch, declared: “In a few years people who speak in English will feel ashamed.” This wasn’t a slip of the tongue. Shah has long shown his fondness for “One Nation, One Language” and his distaste for English. Read between the lines and the message is clear: India’s rulers want to dictate not just how we vote, but how we speak, eat, pray, and now, even how we play.

Indian politicians have one hobby that beats all others: sermonising. Instead of governing—writing policy, enforcing contracts, ensuring safety—they prefer to instruct citizens. Governance becomes homily, laws become sermons.

Take two excellent columns in Business Standard. Devangshu Dutta dissects India’s new Online Gaming Bill, 2025, calling it another example of politicians confusing governance with sermonising. The bill, with one sanctimonious sweep, outlaws fantasy sports, rummy, poker—any game where money is wagered in hope of winnings, whether by “skill” or “chance.”

This is not new. Stalin tried it. Khomeini tried it. Both failed. But our babus believe they can succeed where dictators fell flat.

It reminded me of Modi Sarkar 1.0’s Corporate Social Responsibility farce. Remember? Companies were ordered to donate 2% of profits or face prison. Yes, prison—for not giving away their own money. Eventually, bureaucrats whispered sense into ears: jailing industrialists doesn’t look good on Ease of Doing Business rankings. The jail clause vanished, but the instinct to control, to nanny, survived.

Meanwhile, as The Economist noted, India has 7,305 criminal offences on its books, three-quarters punishable with imprisonment. The United States, with ten times India’s enforcement machinery, has 5,199 federal offences. Think about that. In a country where half the police stations don’t have a functioning toilet, we have criminalised more behaviour than the Americans.

R. Gopalkrishnan, also writing in Business Standard, cuts to the heart of the matter: are Indians being ruled, or served? Laws, he says, are about “doing things right.” Governance is about “doing the right things.” And true service requires four shifts in attitude:

1. Stop treating entrepreneurs as selfish rogues who must be controlled.
2. Replace ambition with aspiration—the former a desperate hunger for applause, the latter a pursuit of genuine transformation.
3. Restore conscientiousness: discipline, dependability, emotional stability.
4. Build alignment between Centre and States, even when governed by different parties.

Measured against this yardstick, the Modi government fails spectacularly.

Both Dutta and Gopalakrishnan show how these sermons hit entrepreneurs hardest. Dutta estimates that the Online Gaming ban vaporised $13 billion in valuations—Tiger Global, Peak XV, all burnt—with 20,000 high-paying jobs gone. Worse, the industry is pushed to the dark web, where crypto replaces tax and government loses revenue. And for what? To tell young Indians that risk-taking—so fundamental to evolution itself—is immoral. As if banning rummy will make Indians monks. The truth is simpler: the state fears autonomy, digital freedom, new economic models. So, it bans. Bans don’t teach wisdom. They teach avoidance. The state loses revenue. The youth lose jobs. Only crooks win.

Gopalakrishnan goes further: it is a miracle India still has a manufacturing sector. With every ambitious, chest-thumping campaign and increased compliance, the percentage of manufacturing in GDP shrinks for the last few years.

Gopalkrishnan’s distinction is crucial. Ambition is about vanity; aspiration is about vision. Consider the government’s advertising spend—perennially showcasing “achievements,” whether real or imaginary.

Take Kumbh Mela 2025. Already recognised as the world’s largest human gathering, the government insisted on hyping it as “the biggest ever.” Ambition. In an era of climate change, an aspirational goal would have been to host the greenest mega-event in history. But aspiration demands humility. Ambition demands applause. Guess which one our rulers chose?

And then comes conscientiousness—or the lack of it. Fish rots from the head. If leaders call opposition parties anti-national, if the Prime Minister invokes mangalsutra and mujra during election rallies, discipline evaporates. Dependability vanishes. This culture breeds spineless politics: good enough for low-end gig jobs, but incapable of producing another R.K. Talwar, who defied Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, or a T.N. Seshan, who made even hardened politicians obey the Election Code.

The rot shows daily. The Deccan Chronicle reported Modi’s Bengal visit: no entry for infiltrators, credit claimed for metro lines, blame heaped on the state. With assembly elections still far away, why turn every public occasion into a pigsty brawl? Instead of cooperative federalism, we get petty point-scoring.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister, put it bluntly: “In a digital world, the state should be transparent to the public. The reality resembles the opposite: citizens become transparent to the state.”

Nowhere is that truer than in Modi’s India. Citizens’ data is vacuumed up through Aadhaar, Aarogya Setu, Digilocker, and countless portals. But the state itself grows ever more opaque—shielding electoral bonds from scrutiny, muzzling RTI, and dodging questions in Parliament. It is inversion by design: rulers see everything, citizens see nothing.

So we return to the fundamental question: are Indians being ruled, or served?

When entrepreneurs are treated as criminals, when ambition trumps aspiration, when conscientiousness is mocked, and when Centre and States brawl like fishwives, the answer is clear. We are ruled, not served.