India’s Parliament Has Forgotten How To Think – OpEd
The Indian Parliament met this February with all the usual ceremony—the grand halls, the formal procedures, and the weight of representing 1.4 billion people. Then Rahul Gandhi stood to question the government about the 2020 Ladakh standoff, chaos erupted, and within minutes the session collapsed into adjournments and accusations. Another day, another failure. At what point do we stop calling this democracy and start calling it what it actually is—political theatre masquerading as governance?
This is not about partisan preference. It is about a legislature that has systematically dismantled its own capacity for serious work. The 17th Lok Sabha sat for just 274 days across its entire term, the shortest of any full-term Parliament since independence. During last year’s Monsoon Session, the Lok Sabha functioned at 29% of scheduled time. Think about that. If you showed up to work and accomplished less than a third of what you were supposed to do, you would be fired.
But raw numbers only tell part of the story. What they do not capture is how deliberately this dysfunction has been engineered. Opposition parties have calculated that disruption generates more attention than debate, so they storm the well and force adjournments. The ruling party has calculated that less parliamentary time means less scrutiny, so they have cut sitting days nearly in half compared to earlier decades. Both sides can justify their behaviour by pointing at the other, and meanwhile the institution rots.
Watch how legislation actually moves through Parliament now. A bill gets introduced. Maybe there are a few hours of debate, often interrupted by shouting. Then it is put to a vote, passes along party lines, and becomes law. The entire process might take days instead of the weeks or months that serious scrutiny requires. Only 16% of bills in the last Lok Sabha went to parliamentary committees—those crucial forums where members from different parties actually work together to examine proposals in detail. The rest simply bypassed the one mechanism designed to catch problems before they become law.
This is not efficiency. It is abdication. When the farm laws passed in 2020 amid mass protests, or when the citizenship amendment sparked nationwide demonstrations, Parliament’s defenders argued that opposition parties had their chance to debate. Technically true. Meaningfully false. Having two hours to discuss legislation that affects millions is not debate—it is performance art where everyone knows the ending before it starts.
The anti-defection law has made this worse by turning elected representatives into voting machines. An MP who votes against party leadership on practically anything risks losing their seat. Individual judgement, the ability to say “my party is wrong on this issue”—these have been legislated out of existence. Party high commands, often unelected, now wield more power than the 543 people voters actually chose. When dissent becomes impossible, deliberation becomes pointless.
What gets lost in all this noise are the actual problems that require parliamentary attention. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the economy, but where is the comprehensive debate about regulation? Climate change threatens agriculture that employs hundreds of millions, but parliamentary discussion remains superficial. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities could cripple critical infrastructure, yet these issues get shoved aside because some MP tore up papers and triggered another adjournment.
The human cost extends beyond policy failures. Watching elected representatives behave like reality TV contestants—vaping in sessions, hurling insults, physically blocking proceedings—corrodes something essential in democratic culture. When Parliament models chaos instead of reason, it teaches citizens that politics is fundamentally unserious and that their representatives are performers rather than problem-solvers. Trust in parliamentary institutions has dropped below 50% in recent surveys. Can you blame people for checking out when their legislature has checked out first?
Yet here is what makes this genuinely tragic rather than merely frustrating: Parliament still contains serious people trying to do serious work. Thoughtful questions get asked. Important amendments get proposed. Cross-party cooperation happens in committees when they are actually allowed to function. The institutional knowledge has not vanished—it has been buried under layers of strategic dysfunction that serve everyone’s short-term interests while destroying the long-term capacity to govern.
Reform is not mysterious. Mandate minimum sitting days and actually enforce them. Send every significant bill to the committee for real scrutiny, not pro forma review. Modify anti-defection rules to allow conscience votes on matters that are not confidence motions. Create meaningful penalties for disruption while simultaneously guaranteeing opposition parties genuine opportunities to be heard. None of this requires constitutional amendments or political miracles—just a willingness to value Parliament as something more than a venue for partisan combat.
The deeper question is whether anyone with power actually wants reform. Opposition parties benefit from disruption-as-strategy because it generates headlines and allows them to claim they are “fighting”. The ruling party benefits from a weakened Parliament because it allows them to govern with minimal accountability. Media benefits from chaos because shouting matches drive ratings better than policy debates. Everyone’s incentives align toward dysfunction.
This is how democracies decay—not through dramatic coups or constitutional crises, but through the slow normalisation of failure. Each disrupted session becomes precedent for the next. Each rushed bill makes the next one easier to rush. Each suspension, each adjournment, each moment when performance replaces substance shifts expectations downward until citizens forget what Parliament is actually supposed to do.
India’s Parliament has not lost its sanity. It has lost something more fundamental—the belief that thinking matters, that deliberation serves a purpose, and that democracy requires more than counting votes. Recovering that belief will not happen through better procedures alone. It requires politicians to decide that building functional institutions matters more than winning news cycles, that their legacy depends on what they create rather than what they destroy.
The question is not whether Parliament can think again. It is whether enough people there remember why they should.