The news item was tucked away on page 17 of the Delhi edition of the Sunday Times of India on June 14. According to it, the distinguished chief guest at the golden jubilee celebrations of the National Institute of Urban Affairs underlined the urgency of building “antifragile systems,” and went on to invite the elite bureaucratic gathering to “introspect and analyse” why all ideas and insights known and often talked about are not implemented and delivered on ground.A perfect question really, and one which assumes great significance given that the man raising it is none other than P.K. Mishra, principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Along with national security adviser Ajit Doval, Mishra has been Modi’s most constant and trusted Seva Teerth Delhi (as the PMO is now called) presence these past 12 years. Though he is no P.N. Haksar, Mishra is counted among the handful of strong and moral men who have lent substance and heft to the Modi regime.It is precisely for this reason that the theme the principal secretary has touched upon deserves reiteration and resolution. It is something that stares us in the eye every day in every city. One has only to read the morning newspapers to get an idea of the extent to which administrative shabbiness has come to pockmark our national journey towards a ‘viksit’ Bharat.Indeed, the sceptic may well ask: When juxtaposed with all the hullabaloo about surpassing Jawaharlal Nehru’s record as PM, does Mishra’s invitation to “introspect and analyse” not amount to a confession of a job only half-well done, if not of total failure?Perhaps the principal secretary was in a ruminating mood, like Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’:They wept like anything to seeSuch quantities of sand:‘If this were only cleared away,’They said, ‘it would be grand.’Poetry and polemics apart, the subject that Mishra has touched upon goes to the very heart of the art and craft of government. From the very early years of our nation-building, it was presumed that all that was needed was idealism at the top and a few decent and competent officers to set in motion the wheels of government cranking efficaciously. After so many decades, we still subscribe to that easy deceptiveness.There are three dimensions to the theme the principal secretary has raised.First, the leadership’s primary task is to unleash and harness social energies needed to accomplish collective goals and missions. Since no government functions in a vacuum, society’s cumulative values, habits and traditions can often become an obstacle to progress. Except Nehru, who repeatedly stressed that nation-building was a collective enterprise and exhorted the masses to join in the task, no other leader has consciously sought to enlist the citizens’ enthusiasm and dynamism for progress and change. Since 1991, considerable faith has been placed in the market and its animal spirits to run with the ball. That faith has not been fully requited.To be fair, Modi began his prime ministerial innings seeking people’s participation and passion for building a Naya Bharat. That urge soon petered out. Finding himself overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, he began relying on ‘master strokes’ like the demonetisation exercise. The marked accent was on government initiatives and grand projects (like the bullet train), relying on jugalbandi between the contractor class and the bureaucracy. End result: the total absence of a requisite work culture among vast swathes of the population. The solution: free rations for 80 crore people.The second dimension of Mishra’s question has to do with our depleting moral capital. Because we insisted that we were building a Naya Bharat, we did not feel obliged to honour time-tested principles like transparency, openness and accountability. Citizens were disabused of the notion that they could ask the powers that be a few questions. Key areas of governmental functioning became shrouded in secrecy. When practiced as widely as it has over the past decade, secrecy takes its toll on integrity, honesty and decency on a grand scale. No bureaucrat, no corporate hustler, no dalal, no political operative of the ruling party needed to fear either law or exposure by the media. These 12 years of a closed system of government have had a cascading effect on society’s ethics. It seems everyone is trying to cheat everyone else.Nothing illustrates this creeping moral degradation better than the allegation of theft at Ayodhya. Among Modi’s official list of ‘achievements’ in the dozen years he has been in power is the construction of a ‘bhavya’, or grand, Ram temple. The consecration event, let it be recalled, was hailed by him and his followers as the dawn of a new India, heralding a new renaissance, and a determination to regain our national glory. But now, even donations for Ram are apparently not beyond the reach of thieves and their political patrons. And, think of it, only a week ago the RSS sarsanghsarchalak was asserting that Bharat is dharam-pran (spiritually-rooted). The gap between rhetoric and reality is crippling our national elan.Coming now to the third major aspect of the question Mishra posed, surely he needs to ask himself whether the craft of government in India can remain immune from the nature of our political leadership. The government the principal secretary has steered all these 12 years is defined and characterised by a ‘charismatic’ leader. And, it is the nature—and, the bane—of charismatic leadership that loyalty is directed more at the leader than at institutions and systems or even the constitution. The last 12 years have resulted in the legitimisation of normlessness. As long as the Leader is kept in good humour, no one need bother with bureaucratic standards and practices and precedents or performance or delivery. The art of government has been reduced to headline management.As Modi’s principal secretary, Mishra is presumably not very involved with – or even bothered by – the political dishonesty that is let loose in the polity. He may or may not be involved in strategising how to distract a restive public with new stunts and shenanigans. But as the custodian of India’s administrative delivery system, he is of course entitled to demand a closing of the gap between rhetoric and results. Thank you, Mishra ji for reminding us that national greatness is not built on layers of fragilities.