An opinion piece on how “PC culture” normalises corruption, weakens governance, and silently erodes democratic ethics, public trust, and accountability
Rabindra Kumar Nayak
There are words that do not appear in official files but decide the fate of those files. PC – ‘talking percentage’ – is one such word. It is never written, rarely denied, and almost always understood. Spoken in lowered voices across corridors of power, it has become the invisible ink in which many government projects are truly drafted. What was once an aberration, a moral deviation, has slowly hardened into routine. And when routine replaces conscience, democracy begins to rot from within.
PC is not merely corruption; it is a grammar of governance. Before a road is drawn on paper, before a school is sanctioned, before a welfare scheme is announced, the unspoken question arises – not who needs it most, but what percentage will travel upward. Thus development is no longer imagined as a public good but calculated as a divisible sum.
This arithmetic thrives on silence. Everyone knows, yet everyone pretends not to. Files move smoothly, approvals arrive on time, and the machinery appears efficient. But beneath this surface order lies a profound disorder – a system that has learned to function by bleeding itself.
PC does not descend like a sudden storm; it seeps like polluted rain. From policy rooms to field offices, from consultants to contractors, it trickles downward, ensuring that no hand remains clean enough to throw the first stone. Each level justifies itself by pointing to the one above. Thus guilt is distributed, diluted, and finally normalised.
In this chain, public money is reduced to prey. Roads are thinned, concrete is weakened, classrooms are built with hollow walls, and hospitals rise without soul or substance. What collapses later in brick and mortar had already collapsed earlier in ethics.
Democracy, at its heart, is a moral promise: the state will act as trustee of the people’s resources. PC shatters this promise. It converts citizenship into a transaction where the people pay twice – once through taxes and again through broken services.
Elections continue, slogans change, and faces are replaced, yet the PC culture remains untouched, immune to ideology. It survives governments because it has outgrown politics and embedded itself in administrative habit. When corruption becomes habitual, democracy becomes performative.
The true victims of PC are not abstract numbers; they are invisible lives. The village road that washes away in the first rain belongs to a child who walks barefoot to school. The substandard hospital wing belongs to a patient who waits too long for care. The incomplete irrigation project belongs to a farmer who watches his field crack under the sun.
PC decides which region deserves development and which can be ignored. Thus corruption quietly redraws the map of inequality, favouring visibility over vulnerability.
Perhaps the deepest tragedy of PC culture is the death of moral resistance. Young officers enter service with ideals, only to encounter the seasoned advice: This is how things work. Refusal is branded impractical; integrity is mocked as arrogance. Slowly, survival replaces service.
When an entire system teaches its servants to adjust rather than resist, democracy loses its ethical spine. What remains is governance without gravity – busy, noisy, and hollow.
There is a dangerous belief that PC is inevitable, that it lubricates the wheels of a complex state. But corruption never lubricates; it corrodes. It eats into the vitals of the institutions the way termites eat into wood – silently, patiently, until collapse appears sudden but is long prepared.
No society can steal from itself forever.
Ending PC culture requires more than laws and audits; it requires moral imagination. Transparency must become real, not ritual. Whistleblowers must be protected not only by statutes but by social respect. Above all, corruption must once again feel shameful.
Citizens, too, must refuse to treat PC as folklore. Normalisation is corruption’s greatest victory.
PC is the poetry of decay – subtle, whispered, and devastating. It turns governance into bookkeeping and democracy into a ledger where the people always lose. A nation cannot be built on percentages taken in the dark; it must be built on principles held in the light.
The choice before us is stark: do we accept the language of PC, or do we restore the language of public trust? In answering this, we decide not just the fate of projects, but the future of democracy itself.
(The author is a former Reader in English. Views expressed are personal.)
