Prevarication sits in the moral grey zone between honesty and lying. The prevaricator says things that are technically not false but are crafted to mislead — through omission, ambiguity, or shifted definitions.
For UPSC Ethics (GS4), this distinction is crucial: many ethical codes treat prevarication as nearly as serious as outright falsehood because it weaponises language. In Governance Mains answers, the word is useful for analysing how public officials sometimes manage to comply with formal answer-the-question rules while still avoiding accountability.
