Earlier this week, I took a couple of colleagues to the Gandhi Ashram while we were in Ahmedabad.
It wasn’t meant to be a profound moment. It was their first time in the city, and the ashram felt like the right place to take them—quiet, grounded, almost understated. Walk through. Read a few inscriptions. Absorb some history. Move on.
I’ve been to the ashram many times over the years. Enough that I thought I knew what to expect. Enough that I didn’t imagine I’d stop at any one display for very long.
But this time, I did.
One passage caught my attention
“My notion of democracy is that under it the weakest should have the same opportunity as the strongest..No country in the world today shows any but patronising regard for the weak….Western democracy, as it functions today, is diluted fascism…. True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below by the people of every village.”
I read it once. Then again. And then took a picture.
Not because the words were shocking, exactly. But because they felt uncomfortably current. Like something written for this moment and somehow misplaced in time.
A few days earlier, I had read a letter that left me unsettled in a similar way.
Sixty CEOs of some of the state’s largest and most influential companies had issued a joint statement responding to what has been unfolding—federal immigration enforcement actions, fear rippling through communities, protests, lives lost. The letter called for calm. For de-escalation. For cooperation between local, state, and federal authorities.
It was careful. Measured. Almost certainly shaped by legal teams and communications advisors. By every conventional standard, it was responsible.
And yet I reacted to it immediately. I even said so publicly. Not because it was wrong, or offensive, or ill-intentioned. But because something felt absent.
The statement hovered above the moment it was responding to. It named tension without naming harm. It spread responsibility so widely that no one voice had to actually carry it.
At the time, I couldn’t fully explain why it bothered me. I chalked it up to instinct—another moment where leadership defaulted to process when the situation felt anything but procedural.
Standing there at the ashram, I finally figured out why the letter caused me discomfort.
Gandhi wasn’t railing against power. He wasn’t being dramatic. He was diagnosing something quieter—and more dangerous. What happens when responsibility migrates upward. When participation gives way to administration. When people begin to believe that democracy is something managed on their behalf rather than something they are actively responsible for.
We invoke democracy so easily—in economics, in policy, in governance—as if the word itself carries moral weight. As if aggregation were the same thing as justice. As if harm becomes acceptable once it is spread thin enough, or borne by the few instead of the many.
Gandhi was calling that out for what it often becomes: moral math. A way to justify outcomes without ever asking who absorbed the cost.
And suddenly, the CEO letter made sense to me in a different way.
The issue wasn’t caution.
It wasn’t coordination.
It wasn’t even neutrality.
It was delegation.
What I had been reacting to—without yet realizing it—was the quiet outsourcing of conscience. The way moral responsibility gets handed off to systems, statements, and processes precisely when it needs to be carried personally.
The letter hadn’t failed because it was wrong.
It failed because it had no owner.
That’s when Gandhi’s warning stopped feeling historical. It felt diagnostic.
He wasn’t describing a democracy under attack from outside forces. He was describing what happens when democracies hollow themselves out from within—when systems continue to function smoothly, even admirably, while moral agency quietly disappears behind them.
That realization forced a question I wasn’t entirely prepared to ask.
Am I complicit in this too?
I don’t actually know.
And the fact that I don’t know feels important.
Complicity isn’t always loud. It isn’t always malicious. More often, it shows up as participation without interruption. As benefit without resistance. As fluency in systems that work well enough for us, even when they fail others.
I work with institutions. I advise leaders. I spend time in rooms where decisions are shaped carefully, where language is softened, where risk is measured and often minimized. I understand why caution exists. I understand why statements get written the way they do. I understand the incentives that reward restraint over clarity.
So where, exactly, does responsibility sit?
Is complicity agreement?
Is it silence?
Is it convenience?
Or is it something subtler—the gradual acceptance that moral discomfort is simply the price of operating inside large, complex systems?
That’s where Gandhi’s warning begins to feel less like history and more like a mirror.
Because once conscience is treated as something that can be delegated—to a committee, a board, a process, a policy—it becomes increasingly difficult to locate who is actually responsible for carrying it.
And this isn’t limited to one letter, one company, or one state.
You see it everywhere.
Corporations that speak fluently about values but freeze when values demand cost. Universities that celebrate justice rhetorically while organizing themselves around prestige and insulation. Democracies that treat participation as voting alone, not as ongoing moral engagement.
We’ve built extraordinarily sophisticated systems for decision-making. But we’ve paired them with a quiet assumption that moral weight should be absorbed by the structure itself.
If the policy passed, the system worked.
If the vote held, the process functioned.
If the letter was issued, leadership responded.
And yet something keeps leaking out.
Trust.
Legitimacy.
Belonging.
This is where Gandhi’s critique of “the greatest good of the greatest number” stops being philosophical and becomes piercing. Majorities are efficient, but they are not inherently moral. Systems can optimize outcomes without ever asking who paid the price.
That’s not a flaw in democracy. It’s a flaw in how we practice it.
And when that gap grows wide enough, people don’t wait for permission to act. They don’t wait for statements or frameworks. They reclaim moral agency themselves—in the streets, in communities, in ways that feel messy, imperfect, and deeply human. Like we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
That isn’t a breakdown of order.
It’s a response to its absence.
Which brings me back to the question I can’t quite answer—not just for leaders or institutions, but for myself.
At what point does understanding a system become participation in its moral blind spots?
And how many of us have mistaken fluency in process for innocence?
Once you start seeing it, it’s hard to unsee.
Moments where people act with clarity not because a system told them to, but because something inside them refused to stay quiet. Moments where communities move first, and institutions scramble to catch up. Moments where leadership, at least in its formal sense, seems strangely absent—replaced instead by ordinary people deciding that waiting is no longer acceptable.
That’s not chaos.
That’s moral agency reasserting itself.
And it leaves me with another question I don’t yet have an answer for.
If conscience keeps reappearing outside the systems we’ve built to manage our lives, what does that say about the way we’ve been using those systems?
And more uncomfortably still:
If leadership today feels absent, is it because leaders have failed—or because the rest of us have quietly agreed to let them carry what was never theirs alone?
I don’t have an answer yet.
But I’m no longer convinced that neutrality is innocence. That participation without interruption is harmless. Or that conscience can be delegated without consequence.
That unresolved question is the one I’m carrying forward.
Because whatever comes next will require more than statements, more than structures, more than systems that technically still work.
It will require people—each of us—deciding whether we are willing to carry our conscience ourselves.
Or let a system make that decision for us.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
