The 'system' may be dysfunctional but who failed to reform it?

The Modi government had ample time for reforms but in spite several warnings and suggestions it has failed to do so.

Forty years ago when European history was taught in India through the British prism and via British textbooks, an evergreen question was “Discuss the underlying and proximate causes of the French Revolution of 1789.” 

The expected answer was that the underlying cause was mis-governance and the immediate cause was insensitivity.

If, fifty years from now a similar question is asked about India’s tryst with the Corona pandemic, it will probably elicit a similar answer: administrative incompetence and political insensitivity.

But as with all set piece answers, this is the formula view--both correct and misleading at the same time because the