New Delhi, April 14 -- In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon argues that great institutions rarely collapse in a single moment. Instead, they weaken through small, compounding failures-the corruption and king-making of Praetorian Guard, or to the steady erosion of civic virtue and public spirit among Roman citizens. That lens is useful in parsing the current strains within the Tata Group.

Some of the facts started out as merely procedural. Former trustee Mehli Mistry filed an affidavit before the Maharashtra Charity Commissioner challenging whether two of Tata Trusts' own vice-chairmen, Venu Srinivasan and Vijay Singh, were even eligible to serve, given that the 1923 deed of the Bai Hirabai Jamsetji Ta...