Why Transparency Alone Cannot Save a Democracy
Every democracy promises transparency.
Every democracy also keeps secrets.
At first glance, these two ideas seem impossible to reconcile.
Citizens expect governments to explain their decisions.
Governments insist that some decisions cannot be fully explained.
Military operations remain confidential.
Intelligence agencies function in secrecy.
Diplomatic negotiations often take place behind closed doors.
Yet democracy derives its legitimacy not merely from elections, but from accountability.
If citizens cannot know how power is exercised, how can they ever judge whether that power has been exercised responsibly?
The real constitutional challenge, therefore, is not choosing between transparency and secrecy.
It is deciding where one should end and the other should begin.
This question has become increasingly important because modern democracies are expected to achieve two objectives simultaneously.
They must govern effectively.
They must also remain answerable to the people.
The difficulty lies in ensuring that one objective does not gradually erode the other.
Transparency Is Not a Moral Ideal. It Is the Infrastructure of Accountability.
Transparency is often described as an ethical virtue.
Governments should be transparent because honesty builds trust.
While true, this explanation captures only part of the picture.
Democracy requires transparency for a far deeper institutional reason.
Power cannot be held accountable unless it can first be examined.
Parliament cannot question information it never receives.
Citizens cannot evaluate decisions they are never allowed to understand.
Institutions cannot learn from failures that remain permanently hidden.
Transparency therefore is not simply about making governments appear open. It is the mechanism through which democratic accountability functions, allowing governments to learn from both success and failure.
A government that publicly accounts for both its successes and its failures creates opportunities for institutional learning.
Mistakes become visible.
Policies become open to correction.
Public debate becomes informed rather than speculative.
As one of the defining principles of democratic governance suggests, a public accounting of both gains and losses is the best way to ensure wise decision-making.
Transparency therefore serves a constitutional purpose rather than merely a moral one.
Yet this immediately creates another question.
If transparency is so essential for democracy, why does every democracy continue to keep secrets?
Why Democracies Need Secrecy.
Imagine a government publishing military plans before an operation begins.
Imagine intelligence agencies disclosing the identities of their sources.
Imagine sensitive diplomatic negotiations unfolding in public.
The state would certainly become more transparent.
It would also become incapable of protecting itself.
Democracy therefore accepts something that initially appears contradictory.
Certain forms of secrecy are not failures of democratic governance.
They are conditions for its survival.
Military operations depend upon surprise.
Intelligence gathering depends upon confidentiality.
Diplomatic negotiations often succeed precisely because every conversation is not immediately made public.
In each of these situations, secrecy protects the public interest rather than undermining it.
Secrecy becomes constitutionally problematic only when it stops protecting the nation and begins protecting institutions from scrutiny.
The constitutional question is no longer whether information should remain confidential during an operation.
The question becomes whether accountability itself should remain confidential after the operation has ended.
That distinction marks one of the most important boundaries in any democracy.
The Constitutional Line Democracy Cannot Cross.
Democracies do not choose between secrecy and transparency.
They separate operational secrecy from public accountability.
These two principles serve entirely different purposes.
Operational secrecy protects missions.
Public accountability protects democracy.
A military operation may legitimately require complete confidentiality while it is being planned and executed.
Revealing operational details at that stage could compromise national security itself.
But once decisions have been taken…
once public resources have been committed…
once lives have been affected…
the nature of secrecy changes.
Operational concerns gradually give way to democratic accountability.
Parliament and citizens acquire a legitimate interest in understanding how public power has been exercised.
The question is no longer about revealing military strategy.
It is about ensuring that public authority remains answerable for its decisions.
This distinction explains why the debate surrounding Operation Sindoor became constitutionally significant.
The controversy was not fundamentally about demanding access to operational military plans.
It centred on whether information concerning the deaths of six soldiers remained unavailable to Parliament even after the immediate operational reasons for secrecy had substantially passed.
Despite internal tributes by senior military leadership, Parliament had earlier been informed that no Indian soldiers had been harmed during the retaliatory strikes, with the official acknowledgement of the casualties coming much later.
The constitutional debate, therefore, was never simply about military secrecy.
It was about whether operational secrecy had gradually expanded into political insulation.
That difference is crucial.
Operational secrecy strengthens democracy by protecting the nation. Political secrecy weakens democracy by preventing Parliament from performing one of its most fundamental responsibilities.
Secrecy remains legitimate only so long as it protects the public interest. The moment it begins protecting public authorities from democratic scrutiny, it ceases to function as a security mechanism and starts functioning as an accountability deficit.
This raises a larger question.
If accountability is the constitutional principle, should it apply only to governments?
Or should it apply wherever public power is exercised?
Accountability Follows Public Power, Not Public Ownership.
If accountability exists to scrutinise the exercise of public power, another question naturally follows.
Should accountability depend upon who owns an institution?
Or should it depend upon the kind of power that institution exercises?
Traditionally, democracies answered this question through ownership.
Government departments were expected to remain transparent because they belonged to the state.
Private organisations were assumed to remain outside that framework because they belonged to private individuals.
Modern governance no longer fits this simple distinction. Many legally private institutions now exercise unmistakably public power—regulating opportunities, representing the nation and enjoying exclusive privileges that directly affect millions of citizens.
The debate surrounding the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) illustrates this transformation.
The BCCI is formally a private body.
Yet it performs functions that are unmistakably public.
It selects India’s national cricket team.
It enjoys a virtual monopoly over the sport.
It has benefited from substantial indirect state support, including tax exemptions and access to public land at highly concessional rates.
Recognising this unique position, the Law Commission recommended that the BCCI be treated as a public authority because of its “tacit monopoly” and public functions. The National Sports Governance Bill, 2025 similarly seeks to bring national sports federations within a stronger transparency framework. Even then, implementation continues to face legal resistance.
This is not merely a debate about cricket administration.
It reveals a much broader constitutional principle.
Public accountability cannot depend solely upon legal ownership.
Otherwise, democracies could steadily transfer public functions to formally autonomous institutions while allowing those institutions to remain outside democratic scrutiny.
Wherever public power exists, public accountability must eventually follow.
That principle extends far beyond autonomous institutions.
It also applies to those who ultimately exercise political power itself.
The Real Ethical Crisis Is Not Criminality.
It Is Incentives.
The criminalisation of politics is often described as an ethical failure. That explanation focuses on the outcome rather than the system that produces it.
The deeper constitutional question is far more uncomfortable.
Why do political parties repeatedly nominate candidates with criminal backgrounds despite widespread public criticism?
The answer lies in institutional incentives.
Political parties do not primarily maximise ethical standards.
They maximise electoral success.
The data illustrates this incentive with remarkable clarity.
According to the Association for Democratic Reforms, nearly 46 percent of Members of Parliament and 45 percent of Members of Legislative Assemblies currently face criminal cases.
More revealing, however, is the difference in electoral success.
A candidate with a criminal background has a 15.4 percent probability of winning an election.
A candidate with a clean background has only 4.4 percent.
These numbers explain why repeated judicial interventions have struggled to transform political behaviour.
The obstacle is structural. Political parties operate according to an unwritten organisational logic in which electoral success consistently outweighs ethical vetting.
Despite constitutional values, Supreme Court interventions and repeated public debate, political parties continue to operate according to a simple institutional calculation.
If a candidate is significantly more likely to win, that electoral advantage frequently outweighs concerns regarding integrity.
The Supreme Court’s judgment in Lily Thomas attempted to strengthen ethical accountability by removing the protection that previously allowed convicted legislators to retain their seats while appeals remained pending.
Similarly, proposals such as the 130th Constitutional Amendment Bill seek to ensure ethical continuity by requiring the removal of Ministers who remain under prolonged detention.
Yet these reforms also reveal another constitutional challenge.
Every mechanism designed to strengthen accountability must also guard against the possibility of political misuse.
Law can establish standards.
It cannot eliminate incentives.
Unless institutional incentives themselves change, transparency alone cannot fully resolve the ethical deficit.
The deeper transformation is not the erosion of accountability, but the changing direction in which it flows.
The Burden of Accountability Is Quietly Changing.
Consider the examples discussed so far—Operation Sindoor, the BCCI and political parties. At first glance they belong to entirely different domains. Constitutionally, however, they all ask the same question: Who remains answerable when public power is exercised?
The debate surrounding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar brings this question into even sharper focus.
The controversy was not simply about updating electoral rolls.
It centred on whether the burden of proving eligibility had increasingly shifted onto citizens themselves, particularly vulnerable groups such as the elderly, persons with disabilities and the sick.
Viewed alongside the earlier examples, what appears to be an administrative exercise reveals a much deeper institutional transformation.
Earlier, democratic accountability largely required institutions to justify their actions before citizens.
Increasingly, citizens are being required to justify themselves before institutions.
The same pattern appears elsewhere.
Citizens seeking transparency from powerful organisations often encounter prolonged legal barriers.
Public authorities determine not only what information will be disclosed, but also when and under what conditions citizens may obtain it.
The burden of accountability gradually shifts away from institutions and towards the individuals seeking answers.
This may be the most important constitutional transformation running through all these examples.
The issue is no longer simply whether governments are transparent.
It is who now carries the responsibility of proving democratic legitimacy.
Democracy Changes When Accountability Changes Direction
Transparency is often treated as the opposite of secrecy.
In reality, democracies are not sustained by transparency alone.
They are sustained by accountability.
Operational secrecy may sometimes be necessary.
Electoral competition may shape political incentives.
Autonomous institutions may require operational independence.
None of these, however, can alter one constitutional principle.
Every exercise of public power must ultimately remain answerable to the people.
That is why the deeper constitutional question is no longer simply how much information governments disclose.
It is whether accountability itself is quietly changing direction.
Democracies rarely lose accountability through a single constitutional amendment.
They lose it gradually—when secrecy expands beyond necessity, when electoral incentives consistently outweigh ethical standards, and when institutions increasingly expect citizens to justify themselves instead of explaining their own exercise of public power.
Transparency, therefore, is not the opposite of secrecy.
It is the constitutional boundary beyond which necessary secrecy becomes unaccountable power.
Because the moment public power no longer feels obliged to explain itself before the people, secrecy stops protecting the nation and starts protecting power itself.