During the Monsoon Session, a group of Opposition MPs staged a street-theatre skit depicting the Chanda Chori at Ram Mandir at the Parliament’s Makar Dwar. Soon after, a complaint was filed against MP Pappu Yadav and he was attacked with a knife at his residence in Delhi.
On the session’s last day, Opposition MPs protested outside Parliament carrying toy monkeys, chanting a rhyme that translates roughly to: “56-inch ka chhota bandar – kab aayega Sadan ke andar?” Within hours, the ruling party and sections of the media had delivered their verdict: unparliamentary conduct.
That same day, at the Rachnatmak Congress convention, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi hugged party colleague Sandeep Dikshit on stage, mimicking what he called the government’s foreign policy: “I don’t know where he got this idea from… he thinks this is foreign policy.” The outrage was, again, immediate.
Almost entirely missing from all three controversies were the facts that provoked them. The Prime Minister and the Home Minister had, between them, skipped the entire session – leaving the government benches conspicuously empty while the Opposition demanded answers on police action against protesting students and the donation theft that had brought the House to a boil. Rahul Gandhi’s hug, too, wasn’t mockery for its own sake; it was shorthand for a real charge – that Modi’s foreign policy has become a procession of photo-ops and embraces.
The response to all of it was not a rebuttal on substance. It was a lecture on decorum. A toy monkey became the story. An empty chair did not. A hug became an issue. The foreign-policy failure it pointed at did not. A priest costume became a scandal. The donation theft it dramatized did not.
This inversion is the real story. When the mockery of an offence draws more outrage than the offence itself, ask what “order” is actually protecting? The institution or the comfort of those who control it?
The BJP Has No Moral High Ground
Since 2014, Indian political discourse has run on a rule nobody states outright but everybody enforces: the powerless must always behave; the powerful rarely have to. The Opposition, students, protesters and minorities are expected to observe every standard of language and institutional propriety, to protest peacefully, choose words carefully, and – above all – never make the powerful uncomfortable.
The ruling party has repeatedly breached not just the boundaries of parliamentary decorum but the norms of democratic conduct itself, and then rediscovered “decorum” the instant its own behaviour is challenged but the burden of decency, decorum, and civility has been on the opposition.
Narendra Modi did not merely criticize the Chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party, Smt. Sonia Gandhi politically. He called her, for instance, a “Jersey cow” and her Shri Rahul Gandhi a “hybrid calf”. But Modi is not the outlier — he is the template.
Ramesh Bidhuri’s remarks against a fellow MP; the statements of Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, Yogi Adityanath, Prem Shukla, T. Raja Singh, Dayashankar Singh and Harish Khurana – the pattern is clear: corrosive, communal and deeply personal language directed at opponents, minorities and women, inside the House and outside it. It is not disputed. It is documented.
Yet none of it produced the moral panic that greeted a toy monkey. None generated the wall-to-wall outrage that followed a hug or a political skit. When BJP leaders attack, it is called politics. When they provoke, it is dismissed as rhetoric. But the moment someone answers back, there is suddenly an urgent concern for “institutional dignity” and “decorum.”
That tells us something important.
The BJP’s outrage is not calibrated to the offensiveness of an act, the violation of a principle or the seriousness of the conduct. It is calibrated to who committed it – and, above all, to whether power itself is being made uncomfortable.
That is not a commitment to decorum. It is decorum weaponised – a way of policing the manner of the challenge so that nobody has to confront the substance of what is being challenged.
Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle Master’s House
In place of the skit, the toy monkey, the hug, would the ruling party have preferred a formal question, an adjournment motion, a calling-attention notice? Of course. Politeness is easy to demand when you’re the one who gets to ignore it.
The Opposition tried everything. This session, MPs moved adjournment motions, raised zero-hour interventions, and repeatedly demanded the Home Minister answer for police brutality against students and the Prime Minister answer for Chanda Chori in a trust he inaugurated with fanfare.
What followed: none of the legislative tools employed by the Opposition to hold the government accountable were admitted or respected by the government. Bills passed by voice vote within minutes of introduction. The Home Minister and the Prime Minister did not turn up even once to face scrutiny.
This is not an isolated event, but a pattern. During the 17th Lok Sabha, for example, 58% of Bills became law within two weeks of introduction; 35% were passed after less than an hour of discussion; and only 9% saw even one recorded vote. Committee scrutiny fell from 60% in the 14th Lok Sabha to 16% in the 17th. And when dissent could not be ignored, it was simply removed. MPs were suspended on 206 occasions across both Houses during the 17th Lok Sabha.
It is evident, as such, that formal channels work only when the government is committed to being answerable through them. A question needs someone willing to answer it. A notice needs a minister willing to appear and debate. No procedure can manufacture the willingness to be accountable and transparent where it doesn’t exist – and when a government is committed to opacity, telling the Opposition to “use proper channels” becomes a way of blaming the people demanding accountability for the government’s refusal to provide it.
At some point, continuing to knock politely on a door deliberately kept shut stops being restraint and becomes surrender. The toy monkey and the cash-box skit were not substitutes for procedure. They were what was left after the legislative process was exhausted and so blatantly disrespected by the ruling party.
Order Without Justice Is Injustice
Here is the argument in its plainest form, and it deserves to be stated without softening: order is not democracy’s substance. It is, at most, democracy’s furniture. A Parliament can sit in perfect, undisturbed calm and still fail completely at the only job that justifies its existence – holding power to account. When that calm is achieved not by resolving grievances or establishing consensus but by suppressing the people voicing them, it is not a healthy institution. It is an empty ritual, dressed in democracy’s language, performing none of its function.
This is precisely how democracies erode – not in one dramatic collapse, but through a long accumulation of small, individually concessions, each one justified in the name of “order” and “decorum”: a session skipped here, a question deflected there, a complaint filed against whoever staged the protest instead of an answer to what the protest was about. None of these, on its own, looks like a crisis. But the accumulation of these petty individual instances is what leads to democratic backsliding.
A government that skips its own accountability session, refuses the formal channels built to compel a response, and then treats the mockery of that refusal as the real scandal is not preserving democratic order. It is redefining the word – turning “order” into a euphemism for silence, and calling the silence a virtue.
A case for Disruptive Politics
A toy monkey, a mock hug and a skit on Parliament’s steps do not threaten Indian democracy in the way the outrage suggests. The real threat is a government that increasingly behaves as though it owes no one an answer.
When formal channels break down, disruptive politics becomes inevitable. If questions are ignored, motions are bypassed, debates are curtailed and those accountable simply refuse to show up, spectacle that disrupts the choreographed optics of power is no longer a political indulgence. It becomes a necessity.
Disruptive politics is not democracy failing. It can be democracy’s last working check – the noise it makes when formal channels stop responding but citizens refuse to accept silence as the final word.
There is a fundamental difference between disruptive politics that evades accountability and disruptive politics that demands accountability. Collapsing that distinction allows power to have it both ways: silence when convenient, “decorum” when challenged, and accountability in neither mode.
Unruliness, hence, is not disorder. It is what remains after order has been tried – and found no one on the other end.
The toy monkey, the hug, the Chanda Chori skit – whatever the ruling party chooses to call them – are simply the sound of people refusing to let silence pass as peace.