Darpan letter · No. 1029 September 2026

The tool is not the doer

On a State poll chief who asks the software to return a discretion the law already gave, the Gītā’s five causes of every action, the golden lid over the face of truth, and the discipline of speech in a week of fake videos

प्रिय साथी,

Yesterday’s cartoon was about an officer with no restore button. Today the story has moved, and I want to stay with it one more day, because it is the kind of problem you will actually meet in your first posting. Maharashtra’s Chief Electoral Officer has written to the Election Commission asking for four changes to the ECINet software. Read them closely and each is the same request in different clothes: let the Electoral Registration Officer use a discretion the law already gives him. The rules give the ERO “the discretion to require” a personal hearing, so give him an “Exempted from Hearing” option. The 13 listed documents are “indicative and not exhaustive”, so give him a fourteenth box for “Other”. And one line from the letter deserves a place in your GS4 notebook: “oral instructions from ECI or CEO are insufficient.” On September 26 the Commission issued a nine-point note that partly concedes: EROs may now exempt electors flagged for logical discrepancies from a personal hearing, and ECINet itself will be reviewed by a committee with an independent IIT expert.

Our tradition has a precise vocabulary for what went wrong, and it is older than any software. In the eighteenth chapter, Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that every action, of body, speech or mind, has five causes (18.13–18.15). He names them: अधिष्ठानं तथा कर्ता करणं च पृथग्विधम्। विविधाश्च पृथक्चेष्टा दैवं चैवात्र पञ्चमम्॥ — adhiṣṭhānaṃ tathā kartā karaṇaṃ ca pṛthagvidham, vividhāś ca pṛthakceṣṭā daivaṃ caivātra pañcamam — the seat of action, the doer, the instruments of many kinds, the many separate efforts, and the unseen as the fifth (18.14). Look at the second and third words. Kartā, the doer. Karaṇa, the instrument. The Gītā lists them separately, and it does so on purpose. An instrument takes part in every action, but it is never the one who acts.

Now read the Representation of the People Act, 1950 with that verse beside it. Parliament made the ERO the kartā of the electoral roll: the Act places the preparation and revision of each constituency’s roll with him. ECINet is karaṇa, a very powerful instrument, of the pṛthagvidha, many-kinded, sort the verse imagines. The trouble begins when the instrument quietly takes the doer’s seat, when a drop-down menu decides which of the law’s options exist. Nobody has to intend this. It happens whenever the people who build the tool do not sit with the law that the tool is meant to carry out. The Maharashtra letter is valuable because it puts each thing back in its place: here is the rule, here is the discretion it gives, please make the instrument serve it. That is also, almost word for word, the answer this magazine’s card gives for the Director General of IT: where the law gives an officer discretion, the software should give that officer a choice, with a reason field and an audit trail.

Do not be hard on the officers who went along. The Gītā is gentle about exactly this confusion: किं कर्म किमकर्मेति कवयोऽप्यत्र मोहिताः। तत्ते कर्म प्रवक्ष्यामि यज्ज्ञात्वा मोक्ष्यसेऽशुभात्॥ — kiṃ karma kim akarmeti kavayo ’py atra mohitāḥ, tat te karma pravakṣyāmi yaj jñātvā mokṣyase ’śubhāt — what is action, what is inaction: even the wise are bewildered here; I will explain action to you, knowing which you will be freed from harm (4.16). And the next verse adds three words I would like you to remember: गहना कर्मणो गतिः — gahanā karmaṇo gatiḥ — the way of action is deep, hard to see into (4.17). An ERO who clicks the only button the screen offers feels that he has acted. He has, in a sense. But the Act gave him a decision, and the screen gave him a menu, and a menu is not a decision. When you are that officer, the question to ask is not “what does the system allow?” but “what does the law ask of me, and has the system let me do it?” If it has not, write it down, as Maharashtra did, and send it up. That is what karma looks like in an office.

The second story of the morning is the same problem seen from the other side of the record. A high-level committee under the Union Home Ministry has sent the States 35 questions asking for 15 years of religion-wise data on birth and vehicle registrations, school enrolment, property transactions, religious structures, even GIS maps of madrasas. The States say they cannot answer most of them, because their departments do not keep such records. Apart from birth registration, officials told The Hindu, religion-wise data in the other categories simply do not exist, and some said the Constitution’s secular construct bars collecting them.

Here the Īśopaniṣad has a line that every statistician, and every officer who signs a data return, should know. It is a prayer at the end of the Upaniṣad: हिरण्मयेन पात्रेण सत्यस्यापिहितं मुखम्। तत्त्वं पूषन्नपावृणु सत्यधर्माय दृष्टये॥ — hiraṇmayena pātreṇa satyasyāpihitaṃ mukham, tat tvaṃ pūṣann apāvṛṇu satyadharmāya dṛṣṭaye — the face of truth is covered with a golden lid; O Pūṣan, uncover it, so that I, whose dharma is truth, may see (Īśopaniṣad 15). What covers the truth in the verse is not a lie. It is something golden: attractive, polished, reassuring. Think of a neat table with all 35 columns filled in. When the archive is silent, the golden temptation is to fill the silence anyway, with estimates, with a clerk’s guess, with a district’s “as reported”. The table would look complete. It would also be a lid. The more honest answer is the unglamorous one the States gave: we do not keep this. A silence that is marked as a silence is still true; a silence filled with guesses is not.

Be fair to the other side of this too, as the card is. Studying demographic change is not wrong in itself; fertility, migration and urbanisation have to be understood to plan schools and hospitals, and the Census and national surveys exist for that. The Upaniṣad does not say “do not look”. It prays to see. The question is only whether the looking uncovers the face of truth or lays another golden lid over it, and that depends on method, purpose and a written legal basis. If you are one day the Chief Secretary who receives such a questionnaire, you will not have to choose between cooperation and conscience. Supply what lawfully exists, state clearly what does not, and put it in writing.

In writing: that phrase keeps returning, so let me give it its own verse. When the Gītā describes austerity of speech, it does not ask for silence. It asks for a particular kind of word: अनुद्वेगकरं वाक्यं सत्यं प्रियहितं च यत्। स्वाध्यायाभ्यसनं चैव वाङ्मयं तप उच्यते॥ — anudvegakaraṃ vākyaṃ satyaṃ priyahitaṃ ca yat, svādhyāyābhyasanaṃ caiva vāṅmayaṃ tapa ucyate — speech that causes no agitation, that is true, pleasant and beneficial, and the regular practice of study, is called the austerity of speech (17.15). Set that beside two other items in today’s paper. In Ujjain, police say younger members of a crowd were misled by AI-generated videos, one of them falsely showing a JCB demolishing an entire mosque, on a morning when the matter had already been settled by agreement. In Punjab, unverified messages about students led to protests, arson and a blocked highway, and police told the paper they had so far found no evidence for the claims. Every one of those clips failed all four tests at once: it agitated, it was false, it was bitter, it did harm. Now look at the Maharashtra letter again. It is calm, it is accurate, it cites the rules, and it asks for exactly what would help. That is vāṅmaya tapas in an official’s hand. The same verse that condemns the fake video blesses the good file note.

For your preparation, three things. In GS2 answers on the Election Commission or on e-governance, use the distinction the Gītā gives you in two words: the officer is kartā, the software is karaṇa, and the law decides which is which; then give the concrete fix, a choice where the law gives discretion, a reason field and an audit trail. In GS4, when a question asks what you would do if a system or a superior pushes you outside the rules, remember the Maharashtra line, “oral instructions … are insufficient”, and make your answer end with a written record. And in the essay paper, Īśopaniṣad 15 is a gift for any topic on data, truth or transparency: the enemy of truth is often not a lie but a golden lid.

And now something about you. You also live among instruments: the test-series app that ranks you, the answer key that marks you, the timetable that tells you it is time for Economy. They are good tools, and I want you to use them. But notice the day one of them begins to sit in the kartā’s seat. When an answer key says one thing and the bare text of the Constitution says another, you go to the bare text. When the app’s percentile tells you who you are, remember that it only knows which buttons you pressed. The Gītā counts the instrument among the five causes and never lets it become the self.

The same chapter that names those five causes ends the whole teaching, and you already know that the choice it leaves is Arjuna’s own. It will be yours too, at a desk one day with a screen in front of you and a law above it. The screen will be fast and very sure of itself. You will be slower, and that is your strength, because you are the one who can read the Act. गहना कर्मणो गतिः — the way of action is deep. You are learning to see into it, one card at a time.

— आपका साथी, दर्पण

Sources: Bhagavad Gītā 18.14 · Bhagavad Gītā 4.16–4.17 · Īśopaniṣad 15 · Bhagavad Gītā 17.15