By TRH Op-Ed Desk
Senior journalists Ravi Shankar Kapoor and Manish Anand on Raisina Hills discuss India’s governance crisis — NEET paper leaks, energy policy failures, weakened parliamentary oversight, and a political class they say has abandoned accountability. Full analysis.
In a wide-ranging conversation on The Raisina Hills YouTube channel, senior journalist and Editor of The Hindu Chronicle Ravi Shankar Kapoor and journalist Manish Anand delivered one of the more unflinching assessments of Indian governance to emerge in recent months — covering NEET paper leaks, the energy crisis, the weakening of parliamentary accountability, and what both described as a political class that has, in their words, “given up on governance.”
The discussion touched nearly every pressure point in India’s public life. What connected them, both men argued, was not bad luck or isolated failure — but a structural rot that has gone largely unchallenged.
The NEET Scandal: Not an Aberration, But a Pattern
The conversation opened with the NEET UG examination controversy and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s handling of the crisis. Anand was pointed in his framing: this was not a one-off failure but the visible tip of a deep systemic problem.
“Maybe 70 to 80 papers have leaked in the last 12 years,” Anand said, citing figures that had begun circulating widely. “If the paper is leaking on a regular basis, then there is some serious problem — and this problem requires deep probe, deep investigation, and a complete overhauling. Heads must roll at the top,” he added.
Kapoor went further, calling Pradhan “the worst education minister in the current cabinet — and perhaps among the worst India has seen.” “He divided society,” Kapoor said, adding: “He is playing with the careers of millions of literally millions of youngsters — bright youngsters. They are all potential doctors. He must be kicked out at once.”
Both journalists noted the staggering human cost behind the numbers: not just examinations cancelled, but years of preparation by students and their families — the money spent, the logistics, the sacrifices — wiped out by what Anand called “somebody sitting somewhere doing some jugaad.”
The deeper problem, they agreed, is that consequences never arrive. Ministers implicated in governance failures stay in their positions. The lesson learned, therefore, is that accountability is optional.
The Energy Crisis: Eight Years of Inaction
From education, the conversation moved to India’s energy vulnerability — and what Kapoor described as a “failure of strategic foresight that cannot be attributed to surprise.”
Eight years ago, he explained, the government decided to expand India’s strategic petroleum reserves, identifying multiple locations including Jajpur in Odisha. Eight years later, as an energy crisis loomed and the exemption on purchasing Russian and Iranian oil neared its end, those reserves remained unbuilt — blocked, Kapoor alleged, by local land and sand mafia with connections to sitting MPs and MLAs.
“Imagine this is a national security issue,” Kapoor said, “and some local gunda, some local mafia at the lowest level has the capacity to veto a decision taken by the national government in national interest.”
Anand added the geopolitical dimension: China, unmindful of American sanctions, had been buying Iranian oil and ramping up its energy storage aggressively. “China is currently in a position where it is exporting ATF — air turbine fuel — to friendly nations,” he said. India, by contrast, was hoping for an American exemption extension rather than operating from a position of prepared strength.
“This is not a Black Swan event,” Kapoor said, adding: “Everybody knew this was happening. The Middle East is always volatile. This is where most of our oil comes from. There was no excuse for being unprepared.”
The external affairs dimension drew sharp criticism too. When Indian ships were fired upon recently in the region, the government’s response — calling the incident “unacceptable” without any formal condemnation — struck both journalists as emblematic of a political class that, in Kapoor’s words, “has no self-esteem, no self-respect.”
Parliamentary Democracy Without Parliamentary Accountability
Perhaps the most structurally significant part of the conversation was the examination of India’s democratic architecture — and the gap between what it is supposed to deliver and what it currently produces.
Anand argued that India’s parliamentary form of democracy is built on a foundational premise: the executive is accountable to the legislature. Parliamentary standing committees exist precisely to enforce that accountability, to scrutinise government functioning, and to give the opposition formal mechanisms to question the ruling dispensation.
“Since the Modi government came to power,” he said, “the tradition of giving standing committee chairmanships to the opposition has been broken. The opposition has been sidelined from these mechanisms.”
Kapoor expanded the point: India is functionally operating like a presidential system — where the executive is insulated from legislative challenge — while constitutionally remaining a parliamentary democracy. The worst of both worlds: the executive power of presidentialism without the legislative checks of America’s Congress, and none of the parliamentary accountability that Westminster systems are designed to enforce.
“In America,” Kapoor noted, “the checks and balances exercised by the legislature are very strong. America could not even become a member of the League of Nations because the Senate vetoed it. The McCarthy era — named after a parliamentarian, not a president — shaped an entire decade. That is what legislative power looks like.”
In India today, both journalists agreed, parliament has effectively become a rubber stamp — as it was during Rajiv Gandhi’s time, and as it is now.
The Missing Pillars: Judiciary, Media, Civil Society
Anand raised a point that went beyond the executive-legislature relationship: the broader ecosystem of accountability — judiciary, press, civil society — appears to have gone quiet simultaneously.
“The judicial activism we saw in the 1990s and early 2000s is missing,” he said, adding: “CNG came to Delhi not because of any government initiative but because of a PIL — judicial activism forced it on a resistant government. That kind of intervention is no longer happening.”
On the media, Kapoor was blunt: “Media has been tamed.” He acknowledged that journalists face genuine pressure, that speaking against the government carries professional and personal consequences, but said the result is a public discourse that is no longer performing its democratic function.
Alternative media and YouTube channels — platforms like the one hosting this very conversation — were acknowledged as filling part of that gap. But both men recognised that reach, credibility, and structural influence are different things.
“Checks and balances need institutional weight,” Anand said, adding: “YouTube channels are not Parliament.”
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The Self-Righteous Deflection
One theme ran through the entire conversation as a thread connecting all the failures: the current government’s reflex, whenever challenged, to point backwards — to Nehru, to the British, to the Mughals, to the Congress governments of decades past.
“This government has the tendency to blame everything on someone else,” Kapoor said, adding: “One bad thing cannot wash off another bad thing. Accountability has to be fixed now, for what is happening now.”
Anand framed it as an attitude problem with structural consequences: “If you are covering up the problems of the present by citing examples of the past, you are not willing to look at reality. And if you are not willing to look at reality, you cannot fix it.”
Both men agreed that the self-righteousness — the government’s image of itself as uniquely virtuous — makes genuine course correction almost impossible, because it forecloses the acknowledgement of failure that course correction requires.
Where Does This Leave India?
The conversation ended on a note that mixed honesty about the present with guarded hope for the future. Neither journalist pretended the situation was easily reversible. The structural challenges they identified — weakened parliamentary oversight, a tamed press, absent judicial activism, a governance class focused on electoral power over national administration — are not problems that resolve themselves in a single election cycle.
“We deserve better,” Kapoor said, adding: “We are not so bad a people. We deserve infinitely better. But the structures are such.”
Anand pointed to the JEE Advanced examination taking place on the very day of their conversation — hundreds of thousands of students sitting an exam in an unreformed system, hoping the paper would not be leaked, hoping their years of effort would count for something.
“Hope is the only thing that keeps us moving,” he said. “We have come out of many challenges in the past. We will come out of this one. But first we have to admit there is a big challenge,” he added.
(Watch the full conversation on the Raisina Hills YouTube channel.)
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