Blog

Yet another session of Parliament is set to begin on 20 July, and with it returns a familiar question that weighs heavily not only on me but on countless others: will Parliament once again function as a forum for deliberation, persuasion and accountability, or will it merely become a site of perpetual political domination? This anxiety is not without precedent. The Winter Session of Parliament in December 2023 will be remembered less for the laws it enacted than for the manner in which it functioned. In an unprecedented development, 146 Members of Parliament, overwhelmingly from the opposition, were suspended during the course of the session. With much of the opposition absent, several important Bills were debated and passed in a House stripped of much of its dissenting voice. We need to pause and ask whether a parliamentary democracy truly remain democratic when the institution of the opposition is progressively weakened, marginalised, or treated as dispensable?