Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking,” Clement Attlee once observed. Were the old statesman to survey the current aerobics of Indian democracy, he might have revised his aphorism. The malady afflicting the world’s most populous democracy is not that its politicians talk too much, but that they have forgotten how to talk to one another. They scream endlessly from rally stages and through the shrill echo chamber of social media.
As an unfortunate fall out, one hallowed chamber built for that conversation stands sullen, silent and too often adjourned. Government by discussion has quietly mutated into government by denunciation. As a consequence, the talking democracy so painstakingly built by the republic’s founders is perilously close to becoming a fighting one.
The political shenanigans for the past few weeks symbolise degeneration. On November 2, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, smarting from the Prime Minister’s barbed insinuation that forces within the country were peddling lies and fomenting instability, flung down a flamboyant gauntlet. He demanded an open debate with Narendra Modi, at any venue of the Prime Minister’s choosing. A day later he renewed the taunt, “Daro mat, debate me,” offering, with unmistakable irony, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat as umpire.
The ruling establishment answered with a scornful counter challenge. Home Minister Amit Shah declared that the government was ready to summon a special session of Parliament on the electoral-roll revision and the incendiary ‘vote chori’ charge, provided the Congress let the House function.
The BJP president branded Rahul a “toolkit” of foreign forces, while the Gandhi scion accused the Prime Minister of holding office through foreign help. Each protagonist loudly invites the other to debate but none of them agrees on the venue.
The cold numbers of Parliament proceedings since 2024 tell the story more soberly than the overheated wrhetoric. According to PRS Legislative Research, the Lok Sabha functioned for a dismal 15 percent of its scheduled time in the Monsoon Session of 2026. It was perhaps the worst performance since the demonetisation winter of 2016.
Question Hour, that ritual of accountability, survived for a pitiful nine minutes, and nine of the 11 Bills the lower House passed sailed through without a single member other than the minister uttering a word. The previous Monsoon Session had forfeited more than 84 hours to forced adjournments, and the Winter Session of 2024 limped along at 52 percent in the Lok Sabha and a meagre 39 percent in the Rajya Sabha.
The pattern is shocking. Whenever politics turns poisonous, Parliament becomes its first and most defenceless casualty. The Treasury benches accuse the opposition of disruption and filibustering. The opposition replies with a bitter litany of rejected notices, muted microphones and the Leader of the Opposition denied the floor. Even urgent demands for discussing the electoral rolls, General Naravane’s unpublished memoir and the NEET leak are brushed aside by a brute majority that prioritises the passage of Bills over arguments. Both narratives hold a kernel of truth; neither holds the whole of it.
What has vanished is not merely civility and dignity but the delicate connective tissue of democratic life. The invisible connectivity through credible channels—like the discreet telephone call, the trusted emissary, the leisurely cup of tea in Central Hall, where bitter adversaries once quietly settled differences—has been snapped. Indian democracy was never a garden of genteel consensus and the Emergency remains its darkest chapter. Yet, even in fiercer times, parliamentary leaders and Prime Ministers kept the lines open.
Indira Gandhi reached out to opposition leaders when the nation went to war in 1971. Rajiv Gandhi, learning that Atal Bihari Vajpayee needed medical treatment abroad, quietly included him in a delegation to the United Nations, a kindness Vajpayee never forgot. P V Narasimha Rao sent the same Vajpayee, then Leader of the Opposition, to lead India’s delegation to Geneva in 1994 to defend the nation on Kashmir. Vajpayee governed through coalition and conversation, and Manmohan Singh shared with L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley a courteous connect that survived the sharpest floor exchanges.
Behind them stood seasoned interlocutors—Pranab Mukherjee, Pramod Mahajan, Jaswant Singh, Sharad Pawar and others who brokered pragmatic compromises before crises hardened into deadlocks. Even in opposition, the Congress prided itself on keeping the door to dialogue ajar. Now, the new leadership in Congress communicates through abusive barbs and unfounded accusations.
Today that door has been closed. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul rarely share a social platform with Modi and Amit Shah. The vocabulary of politics has slid from adversary to enemy, from rival to traitor. The ruling party taunts that a Congress which has lost three successive Lok Sabha elections and around 90 state elections is now adopting a violent toolkit of regime change. Rahul has responded by a charge that the government survives on foreign favour and electoral sleight of hand. When opponents are recast as enemies, every compromise is condemned as capitulation and every handshake suspected as betrayal.
The bargain on which parliamentary democracy rests is elegantly simple: the opposition must have its say, and the government must have its way. Take away the first and majority rule curdles into majoritarian rule; strip away the second and principled argument hardens into sterile obstruction. Lose that balance and politics degenerates into a permanent campaign in which governance is the unpaid casualty, while unemployment, inflation and agrarian distress wait forlornly in the ante-room as non-issues.
Road shows and street protests are the new megaphones, serving as forums. They amplify, not adjudicate. A televised showdown between two leaders, however gripping, would be a poor substitute for a parliamentary debate governed by rules, preserved in records and concluded with a vote.
The proper arena for the questions is the floor of Parliament and of the state Assemblies. For that, both sides must make the sacrifice that power finds most painful: they must swallow their pride and subdue their egos.
The government must make generous room for the opposition’s agenda, admit adjournment motions, elect a long-overdue Deputy Speaker and treat the Leader of the Opposition as a constitutional office rather than a partisan nuisance. The opposition must accept that a House it paralyses can hold no one to account and must seize offers of debate rather than dismiss them as stagecraft.
History is unsentimental about such quarrels. It will not record who won the war of words on the street; it will record whether India’s leaders kept faith with the institutions entrusted to them. Parliament was not built as a stage for dueling egos but as a sanctuary for the nation’s argument with itself. If that sanctuary falls silent, the noise of the street will not be democracy; it will be its requiem. India’s leaders have mastered the confrontation; they must now relearn the conversation.
Read all columns by Prabhu Chawla
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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