Sir Humphrey Appleby, the incomparable bureaucrat of British television, once explained governance to a bemused minister with characteristic wit: “The correct procedure, Minister, is not a means to an end. It is the end. Once you understand that, everything becomes quite straightforward.” He was, of course, joking. Those who understood his character, however, know that he wasn’t.There is a distinct sophistication to institutional double standards. They arrive cloaked in procedure, bolstered by precedent, and supported by regulation. They do not say we are favouring ourselves. They say the framework requires this outcome. The framework, conveniently was designed by those it now serves.The honourable Supreme Court of India was recently moved to act against three authors of a 14-page chapter in a Class 8 NCERT Political Science textbook. The chapter dealt with one of the pillars of Indian democracy the judiciary. Its fault lay primarily in two paragraphs touching on challenges facing it: pendency and corruption that took up just two paragraphs in 14 pages. The decree that followed, as widely reported, involved excluding the authors from government opportunities without a hearing, and without the due process that courts exist to guarantee. The chapter is understood to be under revision. The stated concern, that 13-year-olds should not be exposed to uncomfortable questions about one institution while others go unexamined, is itself a proposition that warrants examination.Courts routinely ask the most powerful institutions in the land to account for themselves. That is, in fact, the point of having them. I am not a constitutional expert or a lawyer, but I suppose the judiciary should expect of itself what it demands from other institutions: transparency, credibility, legitimacy and due process. A guild, however honourable, that seeks to protect its image ahead of its principles is still a guild.Such examples can be traced to other institutions as well. Consider, for example, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) established in 1997 as an independent buffer between a liberalising market and a government that retained, through Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), a fully state-owned legacy operator. It offers a more nuanced illustration of double standards that have been visible at several points in its regulatory evolution, not just in outcomes but in design.Spectrum, the life force of the telecom sector, has been allocated to BSNL administratively, at rates bearing little resemblance to auction-determined values. Interconnection tells a similar story. Early Interconnect Usage Charges, the fees an operator pays another to terminate calls on a rival network, were structured in ways that favoured the incumbent. Of the nine chairpersons TRAI has had since inception, eight have come from government service. Six of the nine have emerged from a single service cadre. The cadre, like any guild, protects its own. Outsiders are not welcome and criticism even less so.Such regulatory sinecures, prestigious and well-compensated, provide limited incentive to take on the ministry that, for all practical purposes, owns the public sector operator. This is not to suggest that private players have been passive innocents. They have navigated the regulatory environment with considerable skill, litigating effectively, lobbying strategically and occasionally managing to benefit from regulatory shifts. The double standard has therefore not always been binary, even if in the final analysis, BSNL might edge ahead. One solution, as in the case of Air India, would be to sell BSNL at a more appropriate time, excluding the land it owns, and permanently rid the sector of the conflicts of interest and double standards that seep through ownership structures.International institutions are not immune from such tendencies either. Consider the World Trade Organisation’s architecture on agricultural subsidies, perhaps the most glaring example in contemporary trade law of process that is now well past it expiry date. The Agreement on Agriculture sorts subsidies into boxes: green, blue, and amber, the taxonomy designed to lend a veneer of scientific neutrality. Green box subsidies are permissible because they are decoupled from production and therefore, as economic theory concludes, minimally trade-distorting. Blue box subsidies occupy a useful middle ground. Amber box subsidies, the kind India provides its farmers in the form of direct price supports are deemed egregious and subject to reduction commitments.It is a refined architecture that allows the United States and the European Union to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars annually to their agricultural sectors while maintaining that India’s comparatively meagre support is trade-distorting. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy dispenses roughly EUR 55 billion a year, the lion’s share travelling through the green box as income support. The difference between income support and production support is in practice, considerably thinner than the colours suggest. A farmer receiving guaranteed income is a farmer insulated from price signals, which is precisely what price support achieves. The taxonomy differs, although the on-ground outcome does not. As Sir Humphrey might have put it, the real art lies not in deciding outcomes, but in designing procedures that reliably deliver them.The perennial question that these three examples throw up lingers: who monitors the monitors? Sadly, there is no clean answer. One tested approach has been to embed independence structurally within institutional design rather than leaving it to the disposition of who leads it.Accordingly, some of us were conditioned to believe that Anglo-Saxon institutional design was a gold standard. That belief has taken a resounding beating. A leader can dismantle institutional norms very quickly. The repair, if it comes at all, takes decades. What is clear is that leadership matters perhaps more than the institution itself. While we wait for a T.N. Seshan to appear on the stage, young economists who expend doctoral dissertations on whether regulation matters or whether institutions matter might be well served asking a simpler but more inconvenient question: does leadership matter? Sir Humphrey, one suspects, already knew the answer. He simply made sure no one asked the question.Kathuria is Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Shiv Nadar University, and Professor of Economics. Views are personal