Institutions need ideals to give their work meaning. But when institutional prestige becomes a substitute for accountability, the ideal can become an excuse for protecting the institution rather than serving the people within it.
The controversy at IIT Bombay is difficult to discuss because the most important questions remain unanswered. On September 18, second-year BTech student Sahil Wakode died by suicide after an incident during an examination. His family alleged caste-based discrimination and harassment—allegations that have been disputed and remain under investigation. IIT Bombay initially released an account of the circumstances preceding his death but later apologised, acknowledging it was inappropriate to characterise events before they had been established through proper investigative process. Professor Suryanarayana Doolla, the invigilator named in the FIR, was relieved of administrative responsibilities and sent on leave pending inquiry. A 10-member committee is examining the circumstances, while the Mumbai Crime Branch investigates.
It would be premature to turn this episode into a final judgment on any individual. Facts must be established through investigation. But a larger institutional question does not require us to prejudge that process: what happens when an institution's reputation and sense of purpose become so important that protecting them begins to compete with the obligation to remain accountable?
An institution needs a meaningful system. IIT Bombay is not merely classrooms, laboratories and examination halls. Its reputation represents scientific excellence, intellectual discipline, merit and the promise that exceptional effort leads to exceptional achievement. Students and families invest years of preparation, money and emotional energy precisely because they believe those ideals mean something. But an institution's ideals cannot become an immunity system. Reputation should follow from fulfilling institutional purpose—not substitute for it.
That distinction matters far beyond IIT Bombay. Governments, universities, corporations, political parties and bureaucracies all require a sense of purpose. Without one, they degenerate into mechanisms for distributing salaries, contracts and privileges. Yet the opposite danger is equally serious. Once an institution becomes deeply attached to its own prestige or ideology, criticism begins to look like an attack on the institution itself. The organisation then protects its image instead of examining whether it is fulfilling the purpose for which it exists.
Henry David Thoreau's Walden offers a curious way into this problem. Thoreau described human beings as devoting enormous systems of effort to the cultivation and subjugation of a remarkably small biological object—the human body. The observation exposes a disproportion between the scale of human ambition and the physical limits of the individual who carries it. Human beings build systems vastly larger than their immediate biological needs because they do not live by appetite alone. They create meaning around material existence. A house becomes a home; a business becomes a legacy; a university becomes a tradition; a political movement becomes a national mission.
This is one of the great strengths of organised human life, but also one of its great dangers. Meaning allows human beings to build things that outlive them. Institutions survive because people believe the structures they inherit represent something worth preserving. But meaning can also become a protective shell. Once an organisation believes its reputation embodies a sacred purpose, criticism may be interpreted as hostility to that purpose. The institution's symbolic identity then competes with the ordinary obligation to answer questions, acknowledge mistakes and correct failures.
This is particularly important in politics because politics deals with institutions that exercise power over millions. Every political order requires some account of what public authority is for. India's political traditions have offered different answers—self-government, constitutional rights, nationalism, social justice, secularism, development, welfare, federalism. There is nothing inherently wrong with political movements possessing ideals. Politics without ideals can become disturbingly empty. A government needs to know why it is building a road, not merely how much it costs. A welfare programme needs a conception of whom it serves. A university needs an understanding of education that goes beyond issuing degrees.
The danger begins when political meaning becomes detached from institutional performance. A road does not become good because it was inaugurated with a grand speech. A hospital does not become effective because a minister announces it. A university does not become humane because it possesses a famous name. The ultimate test of an institution is whether it can convert stated purpose into reality. This is why the most mundane questions of governance are often the most politically important: Was the road built? Was it built on time? Was it safe? Was public money used properly? Did the hospital function? Did the recruitment examination remain credible? Was the citizen able to obtain the service promised by the state?
Consider the recent controversy over three flyover projects in Rajkot. A Project Management Unit review found that projects expected to have reached around 90 per cent completion were only about 40 per cent complete. The review also flagged rusted steel reinforcement and other workmanship concerns. The Rajkot Municipal Corporation suspended two engineers and issued show-cause notices to two senior officials. The municipal authorities said further investigation would determine the extent of deficiencies and corrective action required.
There is nothing glamorous about such a story. It involves steel, concrete, timelines, supervision and public money. Yet this is precisely where the credibility of the state is experienced by ordinary citizens. Political philosophy ultimately becomes tangible through such mundane encounters: a road that holds, a bridge that is safe, a hospital that functions, an examination that is fairly conducted, or a public office that actually delivers the service it promises.
The same principle applies inside universities and other prestigious institutions. Academic standards matter. Examination rules matter. Institutional autonomy matters. But so do due process, transparency and the dignity of the people subject to institutional authority. These principles are not enemies. An examination system that cannot enforce rules cannot credibly measure academic achievement. At the same time, an institution that enforces rules without adequate transparency or fair process can damage the very legitimacy those rules are meant to protect. Institutional authority becomes credible not simply because it has the power to impose rules, but because those subject to its authority can reasonably trust the procedures through which those rules are applied.
That is why the IIT Bombay controversy should be approached with care. The question is not whether the institute should defend academic standards. It should. Nor should allegations against faculty or administrators be treated as established facts before investigations are completed. The deeper question is whether an institution can defend its standards and remain completely open to scrutiny when something goes seriously wrong. Those principles are not contradictory.
Indeed, they reinforce each other. A strong institution should not fear an investigation. If its procedures were sound, scrutiny can establish that fact. If they were not, scrutiny provides an opportunity for correction. Institutional credibility is not created by the absence of criticism. It is created by the capacity to withstand criticism without abandoning either fairness or due process. IIT Bombay's own decision to apologise for its earlier communication is instructive: whatever conclusions the ongoing investigations eventually reach, the institution itself acknowledged that certain claims should not have been characterised before they were established.
This distinction also matters in political life. Pragmatism is attractive because it brings political argument back to things that can actually be examined. Did the government deliver the road? Did the programme reach its beneficiaries? Did the public institution function? Was public money spent properly? But pragmatism has its own danger. If politics becomes entirely transactional, the state can gradually be reduced to a network of exchanges. A contractor seeks a contract. An aspirant seeks a posting. A local leader seeks influence. A businessman seeks regulatory access. A bureaucrat seeks institutional protection. None of these interests is necessarily illegitimate by itself. The danger arises when the public purpose that is supposed to govern these relationships disappears. At that point, politics no longer asks what power is for. It asks who gets access to it.
A functioning democracy therefore needs both principle and performance. Principle without performance produces grand language without functioning institutions. Performance without principle can produce an efficient machine with no clear answer to the question of whom it ultimately serves. A government can build roads rapidly and still be required to respect law, procurement rules and public accountability. A university can produce excellent engineers and still have obligations concerning fairness, due process and the dignity of its students. Administrative efficiency and institutional morality are not substitutes for one another.
The Constitution is important in this respect because it places political authority inside a framework larger than the people temporarily exercising it. The minister is not the state. The bureaucrat is not the government. The contractor is not the public. The university administration is not the institution's ultimate purpose. Institutional office is a responsibility, not personal ownership. The legitimacy of authority ultimately depends not merely on who possesses power, but on the principles and procedures through which that power is exercised.
This is ultimately why the question raised by the IIT Bombay episode is larger than the individuals involved. The investigation may establish facts that are currently uncertain. It may confirm some allegations, reject others, or reveal a more complicated picture. But whatever its findings, the institutional principle remains: prestige cannot substitute for accountability.
An institution does not demonstrate strength by making criticism disappear. It demonstrates strength by having procedures through which criticism can be examined fairly, evidence can be tested, mistakes can be acknowledged and legitimate authority can be distinguished from institutional self-protection. The strongest institutions are not necessarily those that never face criticism. They are those whose procedures allow them to confront criticism without treating scrutiny itself as an existential threat.
Human beings build institutions because individual existence is short. We construct universities, corporations, governments, laws and political organisations because we want something to survive us. Civilisation is, in part, the extraordinary human attempt to create structures larger and longer-lived than the individual body. But precisely because institutions outlive individuals, they must never be allowed to become ends in themselves.
A university exists for education, scholarship and the development of human beings. A government exists to exercise public authority within law and to serve the public interest. A bureaucracy exists to administer, not to possess the state. A political party exists to pursue a political programme, not to convert public institutions into instruments of private loyalty. The institution is larger than the individual, but it is not larger than the principles that justify its existence.
That may be the real lesson hidden inside the politics of a few cubic feet of flesh. Human beings spend their brief lives building enormous structures of meaning—universities, corporations, parties, governments, monuments and nations. We need those structures. Without them, collective life would collapse into immediate appetite and private interest. But the structures must periodically be brought back to first principles: What is this institution for? Whom does it serve? How does it know whether it is succeeding? And what happens when it fails?
Those are less glamorous questions than ideology. They are also more difficult to evade. After all the elections, speeches, buildings, contracts, rankings, wealth and institutional prestige have accumulated, the fundamental question remains remarkably close to Thoreau's: what have we built that is genuinely larger than our few cubic feet of flesh—and how do we ensure that what we build does not eventually become more important than the human beings for whom we built it?
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*Ph.D. scholar at Indus University, Ahmedabad
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