A government of reversals is a government without a rudder

There is a charitable reading of the TVK government's first months: a new administration, listening to the public, correcting course. The less charitable reading is the accurate one. A government that announces consequential orders and withdraws them within days is not being responsive. It is governing by trial and error, and the trials are being conducted on the public. Consider what the September 21 order actually proposed. G.O. Ms No. 57 would have exempted the Public (Law and Order) Department — the custodian of inquiry reports into police firings, custodial deaths and police torture — from the Right to Information Act. In plain language: the government tried to put the state's capacity for violence beyond the public's right to know. It retreated only when the backlash reached its own allies. That sequence matters more than the reversal. The order was not a clerical slip. It was a considered decision, defended by the Law Minister himself, that revealed the administration's first instinct about power: shield it. The "reconsideration" came not from principle but from pressure. This is now a pattern, not an incident. A directive on students and political protests: withdrawn. An appointment to the Chief Minister's office: cancelled. Each episode follows the same choreography — announce, defend, retreat — and each is then offered as proof that the government listens. But listening after the fact is not consultation; it is damage control. Consultation happens before the signature, not after the headline. Periyar's warning about power was that it always finds a theory of its own innocence. The modern version of that theory is the press release: every reversal repackaged as humility, every embarrassment as evolution. But humility in governance is not the willingness to undo a bad order under pressure. It is the discipline of not issuing bad orders in the first place — of consulting the affected, weighing the consequences, and respecting the institutions that exist precisely to restrain the state. Vijay's mandate is real, and new governments deserve room to learn. But the classroom is not the secretariat, and the tuition is not paid in abstractions. Every withdrawn order is a week of administrative chaos for the officers who must implement, unimplement and re-implement the state's commands — and a signal to every citizen that the rules they live under are provisional, subject to change at the next news cycle. A government of reversals is a government without a rudder. It may yet find one. But the public is entitled to ask, before the next order is signed: was anyone consulted — or will we be consulted, as usual, after the damage is done?