SSC Stenographer 2026 PYQ — Question 190

In the given passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank:
Contemporary governance will typically disguise itself in terms of agility and crisis response. From climate early warning systems to pandemic dashboards, there is a rapidly increasing apparatus that promises the vision of being in control. Such aids, while useful, tend to (1) _____ the public eye away from structural disparities by concentrating on short-term metrics. What looks like responsiveness tends to be mere reactivity in a system that is optimized for optics, not results.
Governments implement short-term programs, presented as 'emergency relief,' but too frequently without vision or representation in the long term. These measures are hailed not for their depth but for their urgency. The theatrics of governance are most visible, while the slow violence of underfinance of healthcare, food insecurity, and housing abandonment goes on and on. Policymaking is performative in this environment and is not evaluated by what it achieves but by how visible it is. The outcome is an administration style that (2) _____ true change by replacing announcements with action.
This is particularly true in the way that disasters are framed. The media cycle dramatizes, politicians act out urgency, and citizen complaints are quantified into abstraction. Gradually, this storytelling method (3) _____ distress into consumable portions reducing complexity for dissemination. Crisis is a stage; the state, its actor.
To meet this, we need to question how emergencies are constructed, not merely how they are governed. Otherwise, the instruments we construct to deal with suffering risk inadvertently (4) _____ it, locking people in situations they are assured are being rectified. Resilience, without responsibility, is a code for abandonment. Unless governance examines its own aesthetics, it will be a simulation everywhere, but (5) _____ where it is needed most.
Q1: What should come in the place of blank number 1?