Essay · Section A21 September 2026

A rule proves its worth on the day it is inconvenient.

On 17 September, the board of one of India’s oldest business groups met in Mumbai to decide whether its chairman should continue for another five years. One of the directors nominated by the group’s majority shareholder voted against. The independent director chairing the meeting used a casting vote, and the resolution was declared passed. Three days later the shareholder issued a statement worth reading slowly. Its company’s Articles of Association, it said, require the affirmative support of a majority of its nominee directors, and a head count cannot substitute for that. “Whether the result of the vote was 4:1, or any other figure, is irrelevant,” it said, as reported by The Hindu. “A condition is either met, or it is not.”

Who is right is a question for the board, the tribunal and possibly the courts, and an essay is not the place to decide it. What is worth our attention is the shape of the argument. Each side claims to be obeying the rules. The quarrel is over what the rules say at the precise moment when one reading helps one side and hurts the other. That moment is where institutions are actually tested, because a rule that binds only when it is convenient is not a rule at all. It is a preference printed on letterhead.

Consider why rules exist in the first place. Strangers cannot trust each other’s intentions, so they trust an arrangement instead: a set of commitments fixed before anyone knows who will benefit from them. A shareholder invests, a candidate prepares for years, a citizen registers to vote, each on the assumption that the terms will not be rewritten once the result is known. The value of a rule therefore lies almost entirely in its predictability. If it is honoured when it suits the powerful and reinterpreted when it does not, it tells nobody anything about tomorrow, and the trust it was meant to carry drains away.

The shareholder’s second argument makes this point more sharply. The same voting protections, it said, had been challenged during the dispute over the removal of a former chairman, when the appellate tribunal found them oppressive; the company had defended them all the way to the Supreme Court and won. “The Company cannot now disown the protection it went to the Supreme Court to preserve,” the statement said. Whatever its merit in law, the moral intuition behind it is universal. We distrust anyone who calls a rule sacred when it protects them and a technicality when it restrains them. Consistency across time is what turns a clause into a commitment.

Nowhere is this intuition stronger than in examinations. An economist writing in The Indian Express this week observed that the examination system offers families one basic assurance: whatever the inequalities before the paper, the rules governing selection will at least be fair. He suggested that paper-leak protests may be turning that assurance into a genuine electoral question, where decades of evidence on poor school learning never did. The reason is instructive. A broken school toilet is a failure of provision. A leaked paper is a betrayal of a rule, and of the one rule that asked everyone, rich and poor, to submit to the same test on the same day. People forgive a state that cannot do everything. They do not forgive one that quietly makes exceptions to its own promise.

Yet a rule applied without exception is not automatically a rule applied well. In Delhi, the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of electoral rolls has generated notices for 33.1 lakh electors. The list includes a Chief Minister, a Union Minister, a former Deputy Prime Minister and, flagged for a “self-name mismatch” by the Commission’s own software, a sitting Election Commissioner. The procedure, reassuringly, did not pause for rank. But the same draft roll also lists as a 70-year-old elector an economist who died in November 2024, and flags him for “no mapping”. A rule that spares no one earns respect; a rule that cannot tell the living from the dead loses it. Inconvenience proves integrity only when the rule is also accurate.

There is an honest objection to all this, and it should be stated in full. Rigid rules can be cruel. Law is general and life is particular, and every tradition of governance recognises that the letter can defeat the purpose it was written to serve. An administrator who follows a procedure mechanically while a flood rises is not admirable. Dr B.R. Ambedkar put the deeper point in the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949: “however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot.” Rules, in other words, are only as good as the character of those who operate them, and character sometimes requires judgment rather than obedience.

The objection is right, but it points to a distinction rather than a licence. There is a difference between changing a rule and bending it. Change is open, general and prospective: a company may amend its articles by special resolution, Parliament may amend a statute, an examining body may redesign its process, and everyone knows the new terms before the next game begins. Bending is private, particular and retrospective: the rule is read differently in this case, for this person, after the result is known. The first is how institutions adapt. The second is how they decay, and the decay is rarely announced. Institutions are seldom destroyed by open defiance. They are hollowed out by creative interpretation on the day it matters.

This is why the demand placed on public servants is so specific. Following a roster needs no courage when no one important is watching. The test arrives with the telephone call: the transfer that should be made out of turn, the tender that could be slightly re-read, the candidate whose file could move a little faster. On that day the rule costs something, and the officer who honours it is not being rigid. She is converting a sentence in a manual into a fact about the world, so that the next citizen who reads that sentence can believe it.

It follows that the authority of a rule is not conferred by the body that writes it. It is accumulated, one inconvenient day at a time, by the people who keep it when breaking it would have been easier and invisible. Every such day adds a little to a stock of trust that no statement, however eloquent, can replace; every exception withdraws from it faster than it was deposited. The boardroom, the examination hall and the electoral roll are very different places, but they ask the same question. Did the rule hold when someone powerful needed it not to? If the answer is yes, the rule is worth something. If the answer is no, it was only ever a suggestion.