In the fragile bureaucracies of the Global South—Pakistan being an illustrative case—the use of passive voice in official and political discourse is not a stylistic accident but a structural symptom of institutional opacity, where grammar is enlisted to conceal agency, and language itself becomes a barrier to governance and accountability.
One need not look far: phrases like “measures are being taken,” “a committee has been formed,” “regret has been expressed,” and “mistakes were made” are ubiquitous across ministerial pressers, parliamentary proceedings, and state-run media briefings, offering the illusion of responsiveness while meticulously withholding the most critical detail—who did what, and why.
Passive constructions, especially those without agents (agentless passives), strip away responsibility by syntactically severing the actor from the action, and in doing so, they undermine a basic principle of democratic governance: that the public has a right to know who exercised power and how consequences are assigned.
What emerges is a linguistic culture of evasion, where bureaucrats, politicians, and spokespersons routinely retreat into passive constructions to avoid direct ownership of decisions, failures, or misconduct, thus making impunity not only a legal phenomenon but also a syntactic one.
The implications for governance are far-reaching: when reports on public funds state “irregularities were found,” when security incidents are explained by “intelligence was not shared,” or when development plans are “delayed due to unforeseen circumstances,” the passive voice becomes a veil behind which institutional dysfunction and political complicity are safely hidden from scrutiny.
This becomes even more dangerous in the bureaucratic apparatus, where government files, audit reports, and departmental correspondence rely heavily on formulaic, agentless language that both diffuses accountability and enables systemic inertia, allowing officials to operate without fear of attribution or consequence.
In such environments, linguistic structures reinforce structural weaknesses, and accountability mechanisms fail not only due to lack of enforcement but due to lack of linguistic clarity; governance falters when agency is grammatically erased, and transparency becomes grammatically impossible.
Contrast this with democracies that emphasize active voice in official communication, where clarity of agency—“The Minister approved the decision,” “The department failed to comply,” “The officer in charge was found guilty”—not only signals administrative seriousness but also invites public oversight, judicial intervention, and institutional reform.
Of course, passive voice is not inherently deceptive—it has legitimate uses, especially in scientific writing or when the actor is genuinely unknown—but in political and bureaucratic registers of countries like Pakistan, it functions less as a grammatical necessity and more as a rhetorical instrument of avoidance, perfected over decades of authoritarian hangovers and institutional fragility.
Moreover, this culture of grammatical ambiguity trickles down: civil servants learn early that naming names risks retribution, journalists internalize the habit of quoting “sources” rather than officials, and even citizens begin to speak of governance failures in impersonal terms—“policies failed,” “funds disappeared,” “rights were denied”—thus reproducing a collective cognitive model where blame is everywhere and nowhere at once.
If Pakistan, and others like it, are serious about institutional reform, they must first recognize that language is policy’s first messenger—and reform must begin with the way governments speak to their people, draft their laws, and write their records.
An administrative culture that trains officials to write “steps were taken” instead of “we delayed action” is not merely linguistically imprecise; it is structurally dishonest, and in the long run, it corrodes public trust far more than open admission of error ever could.
True reform, therefore, requires a linguistic reorientation—toward clarity, precision, and above all, the courage to name the actor behind the act, because without grammatical accountability, political accountability is always deferred, and democratic maturity remains forever grammatical but never governmental.
