There is a particular kind of political cynicism that doesn’t just spin bad news but deploys the machinery of the state itself to manufacture good news in its place. Over more than a decade in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi has refined this into something approaching an art form. The Union government’s instinct, when confronted with a crisis of its own making, is not to fix the problem but the narrative. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) On-Screen Marking (OSM) debacle of 2026 is one of the most brazen recent illustrations of this tendency, but it is far from an isolated incident.When CBSE declared class 12 board results on May 13, 2026, it triggered what can only be described as one of the most damaging controversies in the board’s recent history. The culprit was the OSM system, a digital evaluation mechanism introduced at scale for the very first time this year. The board had promised it would “eliminate totalling errors, minimise human intervention, and accelerate the declaration of results.” What it actually delivered was chaos.Students flooded social media with accounts of receiving photocopies of answer sheets that were not their own, or sheets so blurry as to be illegible. Correct MCQ answers were given only partial marks, step marking had been ignored, blank pages were uploaded in place of written answers, and scores were inexplicably lower than expected. To make matters worse, a 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher came forward to allege that the OSM portal contained critical vulnerabilities he had reported to CERT-In back in February, including the potential for unauthorised access to examiner accounts and modification of marks. He pointed out that these vulnerabilities had not been patched by the time results were declared. Also read: How India is Failing its StudentsThe structural reasons for the catastrophe were not hard to find. The OSM contract was awarded to Hyderabad-based Coempt Edu Teck on December 5, 2025, just 66 days before a full nationwide rollout was announced on February 9, 2026. Teachers who participated in mandatory mock evaluation sessions as late as February 26 reported portal access failures, slow system performance, inadequate internet connectivity, and data errors. The Delhi Government Schools Teachers’ Association’s (GSTA) formal request to the CBSE to hold the implementation and instead roll out OSM on a pilot basis, went unheeded. The system had, in fact, been trialled for class nine internal assessments during the COVID-19 pandemic and was subsequently dropped after glitches. None of this institutional memory was allowed to slow the rollout.Moreover, a related entity to the same Hyderabad-based software ecosystem had been linked to catastrophic anomalies in Telangana’s intermediate examinations in both 2019 and 2023, incidents in which, at least 19 to 21 students were reported to have died by suicide within a single week, with parents blaming the software firm on both occasions.The PR playbook implementationAs student outrage mounted online, a counter-trend emerged. Principals of CBSE-affiliated schools across the country began posting videos on official school social media accounts. The videos were strikingly similar and sometimes identically worded. Again and again, administrators described the OSM rollout as a “monumental step” towards “modernising the examination ecosystem,” acknowledged vague “implementation bumps,” insisted CBSE had been “highly proactive,” “empathetic,” and “communicative,” and urged students to “embrace these digital advancements with patience” and “trust the system.” Journalist Mohammed Zubair of fact-checking platform Alt News compiled a thread on X documenting these videos under the hashtag #CBSEToolkit. Hindustan Times reported that it had reviewed a document titled “Materials for Principals” (a CBSE-prepared set of talking points) whose contents closely mirrored the messaging seen across the videos. Most of these videos have since been quietly deleted from school pages. Faculty members and students were also reportedly ordered to produce and upload supporting videos. Alt News, which has documented this pattern before, noted that a near-identical playbook had been deployed when ethanol-blended petrol was rolled out and when the Supreme Court accepted the government’s Aravalli Hills elevation formula. As the CBSE class 12 pass percentage declined at the national level this year, Delhi government school teachers found themselves facing memorandums and threats of adverse annual performance appraisals. What was ignored is the fact that the teachers were not at fault but the hastily deployed untested software were responsible for lower pass percentages. Also read: How CBSE Turned School Principals Into Its Social Media PR WingIt is important to note here that no senior government official or minister has resigned and no accountability has descended upon those who made the decisions. Even where consequences appear to materialise, they often amount to little more than a bureaucratic reshuffling masquerading as accountability. In the aftermath of the controversy, CBSE chairperson Rahul Singh was transferred and appointed as secretary of the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, a senior position within the Union government. The public is presented with the image of action while the underlying structure of power remains untouched. Such transfers create the appearance of responsiveness without requiring the state to confront the substantive questions of responsibility or institutional reform. Accountability is increasingly theatrical rather than material. If further evidence were needed that image management remains central to the government’s response to the controversy, on June 10, 2026, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan offered prayers at the Jagannath Temple in Puri to mark Prime Minister Narendra Modi completing twelve years in office. At a time when the Ministry of Education was facing demands for accountability, the public was instead offered a familiar fusion of political loyalty and religious symbolism. This is a particularly potent form of image management for a regime whose support base is deeply invested in both the authority of the leader and the cultural-religious project he is seen to embody.When PR is the policyThe CBSE controversy should not be seen merely as a story about a failed software rollout. It is a broader governing instinct that has become increasingly visible under the BJP. When confronted with institutional failure, the first response is often not correction but managing perception. Political theorist Murray Edelman described this phenomenon as “symbolic politics,” where symbols, rituals, and public performances are used to reassure citizens that a problem is being addressed even when little changes substantively. The reassuring videos posted by school principals are a textbook example. They did not resolve inaccurate marking, investigate procurement decisions, or address cybersecurity concerns. Their purpose was to communicate that responsible authorities remained in control and that public anxiety was misplaced. Similarly, the transfer of the CBSE chairperson created the appearance of accountability without requiring any serious examination of how an untested system came to be implemented nationwide despite repeated warnings.Also read: Facing Mounting Questions, CBSE Drops Coempt’s On-Screen Marking Platform: ReportsThis logic has appeared repeatedly during the BJP’s tenure. Whether it was the defence of the National Testing Agency (NTA) during the NEET paper leak controversy, the presentation of demonetisation as a success despite failing to achieve many of its stated objectives, or the insistence that India’s COVID response had been exemplary even amidst visible systemic collapse, the pattern has often been the same. Political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart have observed that populist governments built around highly personalised leadership frequently prioritise narrative control during crises. As political legitimacy becomes closely tied to the image of the leader, admitting institutional failure carries greater political costs. As a result, criticism is often redirected towards external conspiracies or individual bad actors rather than being allowed to travel upwards through the chain of responsibility. The consequences extend beyond any single controversy. Jürgen Habermas argued that democratic legitimacy depends upon citizens having access to reliable information through which they can collectively evaluate government performance. When governments devote substantial resources to manufacturing favourable narratives around failures, public debate becomes distorted. Citizens are encouraged to discuss whether criticism is unfair, whether the system deserves more patience, or whether isolated individuals are to blame, rather than whether the policy itself was flawed. The result is a narrowing of the space for meaningful democratic accountability.Viewed in this light, the CBSE OSM debacle is significant not only because lakhs of students may have been affected by a malfunctioning system. It is significant because the government’s response reflected a recurring pattern in contemporary governance where institutional shortcomings are met with image management, symbolic gestures are substituted for accountability, and public communication increasingly serves to protect authority rather than scrutinise it. Himanshi Yadav is a Delhi-based legal researcher working on issues related to law, feminism and institutional reform.