There is a particular kind of shame in watching a judge do a regulator's job. That is what happened recently when India's Supreme Court, confronted with evidence of overpricing in essential cancer drugs, reached for a word that no bureaucrat had dared use: dacoity. Broad daylight dacoity. Not a technical infraction. Not a "pricing anomaly." Robbery, committed in the open, on people who are dying. The court's sharper complaint was not just about the drug prices themselves but about the silence around them, the fact that the bodies statutorily empowered to control the cost of life-saving medicine had, for years, simply declined to act.

This is not a new story in India. It is arguably the oldest story in India's relationship with its own governance: a population made vulnerable by structural neglect, and a state apparatus that discovers urgency only when forced to by crisis, court order, or public shaming.

A Familiar Silence

Price controls exist, in theory, precisely for moments like this. They are meant to prevent exactly the kind of extraction the Supreme Court described: a market failure so severe, and stakes so high (a cancer diagnosis, a family's entire savings, a life), that the state is justified in stepping in to cap what can be charged. India actually has a legal mechanism for this in its Drug Price Control Order, administered by the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority. The instrument exists. What seems to have failed is the will, or perhaps the capacity, to use it against powerful pharmaceutical interests. That gap between the existence of a regulatory tool and its actual deployment is where dacoits, broad daylight or otherwise, always thrive.

It is worth asking why this keeps happening, and here history is more useful than outrage. India's regulatory sluggishness on matters of life and death is not a post-independence invention. It is a colonial inheritance, refined over centuries into administrative habit.

The Ledger of Neglect

Consider the famines. The condition of the Indian peasant progressively worsened through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under Mughal decline, as land revenue burdens increased and agriculture stagnated under extractive administration. But it was under a supposedly modern, bureaucratically sophisticated colonial state that famine reached its most catastrophic scale. The famine of 1876-78 killed roughly 8 lakh people in Maharashtra alone, nearly 35 lakh in Madras, and cost Mysore close to a fifth of its population. The 1896-97 famine affected 9.5 crore people and killed nearly 45 lakh. Another followed in 1899-1900. These were not unforeseeable acts of God. Dadabhai Naoroji, writing in the same period, put the failure in terms that echo uncomfortably today: India's property, he said, was not secure from extraction, only Britain's interest in extracting it was secure. "To millions in India, life is simply half-feeding, or starvation, or famine and disease."

Replace "land revenue" with "drug pricing" and the sentence barely needs editing.

The pattern is not that resources were absent. Colonial administrators had census data, famine codes, railway networks that could move grain. What was absent was the political will to prioritize Indian lives over institutional and commercial interests, until the scale of death made inaction politically indefensible. Sound familiar?

Why Regulators Go Quiet

It would be too easy to call this simple corruption or incompetence, though both surely play a role. The deeper pattern, visible across very different histories, is what happens when an institution is handed an enforcement mission against a well-organized, well-resourced adversary while facing no equivalent organized pressure from the victims.

The United Nations mission in Somalia in the early 1990s is an instructive, if unlikely, parallel. UN and American forces arrived in December 1992 with a mandate to disarm warlords like Mohamed Farrah Aidid and deliver humanitarian relief. The warlords refused to disarm, inflicted casualties, and the mission collapsed by 1994-95. The lesson drawn afterward was that the UN had set itself an impossible task: trying to forcibly discipline armed, motivated actors while simultaneously trying to help the people those actors were exploiting. Substitute "pharmaceutical pricing cartels" for "warlords" and "patients" for "civilians," and India's Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority faces a structurally similar bind. It is charged with disciplining an industry with enormous lobbying resources, legal firepower, and international backing, on behalf of patients who have none of these things and, being sick, are in the worst possible position to organize collective pressure.

Compare this to recent developments in pharmaceutical pricing policy. Some jurisdictions have begun experimenting with direct state intervention in drug pricing, using public platforms and convening power to increase price transparency. Whatever one thinks of such approaches, the underlying premise is that the state must intervene directly and visibly, because the market alone has not produced affordable prices for the sick. It is a tacit admission that in pharmaceutical markets, "regulation" cannot mean quiet paperwork issued periodically. It must mean active, sustained, public pressure, or it does not mean anything at all.

The Cost of Half-Measures

India's cautionary military history offers one more angle. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915, pushed hard by Winston Churchill to knock Turkey out of the war, failed not because the objective was wrong but because it was pursued with insufficient force and commitment against an enemy that strengthened its defenses while the Allies dithered. The naval attack failed in March when ships struck mines; the landings in April and August were equally futile against reinforced positions; the whole campaign was abandoned by December, having achieved nothing but casualties and a blow to morale. The lesson historians draw is not that intervention was misguided, but that half-hearted intervention against an adversary given time to consolidate is often worse than no intervention at all.

India's drug price regulation has, for years, looked like Gallipoli in slow motion: an official commitment to the goal, periodic notices and orders, but never the sustained, well-resourced offensive needed to actually dislodge entrenched pricing power. Meanwhile the "enemy," in this case pharmaceutical distributors and manufacturers benefiting from opacity in cancer drug markets, has had all the time in the world to consolidate its position.

There is also a Vietnam-shaped lesson buried here, somewhat perversely. The Vietcong succeeded for years against a materially superior American force in part because they had deep local knowledge, could disappear into the population, and enjoyed something the South Vietnamese government conspicuously lacked: legitimacy earned by addressing genuine grievances of ordinary people against inefficient, corrupt administration. Institutions that fail to address the real, felt grievances of the people they are meant to serve create the conditions for their own irrelevance, or worse, capture by the very forces they were meant to check. A pricing authority that ordinary cancer patients cannot see, petition, or trust is not really regulating anything. It is theater.

What the Court's Anger Actually Means

None of this is to excuse the Supreme Court for stepping into a role that properly belongs to the executive. Courts are blunt instruments for economic policy, and judicial price-setting carries its own risks of distortion. But when a court reaches for a word as loaded as "dacoity," it is not making a technical finding. It is registering, in the only language available to it, that a slower, quieter form of institutional failure has been allowed to compound, year after year, until it became indistinguishable from theft.

India has been here before, at extraordinary human cost, when famine codes existed on paper while millions starved, when land revenue extraction continued while peasants revolted, when property rights were "secure" for the colonizer and non-existent for the colonized. The instruments of protection existed. The will to use them, against powerful and organized interests, did not.

The Supreme Court's intervention should be read not as a solution but as a diagnosis, and an urgent one. Regulatory bodies exist to prevent exactly the kind of predation that requires a judge to invoke the language of banditry. When they fail to do so, quietly, for years, the eventual reckoning is rarely quiet. History suggests it is usually paid for, as it always has been in India, by those with the least capacity to bear it.