Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: Parliament is set to re-open its doors, but will it let debate in?

Between November 2020 to July 2025, according to PRS Legislative Research, the 17th Bihar assembly met for 146 days in all, the lowest of all its five-year terms (the second assembly, for instance, sat for 434 days). It met on an average for just 29 days a year, each sitting lasting around three hours only (way below the five-hour average for state legislatures in 2024). Each and every one of the 78 bills passed in this period was passed on the day of introduction — no bill was referred to a committee, or deemed worthy of a more detailed review or greater scrutiny. With shorter debates, fewer questions, and nearly non-existent scrutiny of laws, the 17th Bihar assembly was among the least active and the least deliberative in the state’s post-Independence history. Yet, in the Bihar election campaign, its feebly functioning House did not figure on the list of issues seen as worthy of being raised by the Opposition parties — or more correctly, by their high commands.

For party high commands, diktat and obedience supersede debate and deliberation. Alongside that Bihar snapshot, take a look at a Karnataka photograph.

In it, two regional stalwarts of the main national Opposition party pose together self-consciously in Bengaluru on Saturday. As Chief Minister and Deputy CM respectively, Siddaramaiah and DK Shivakumar must surely have learnt to work together confidently, but here they look like schoolboys in a command performance. They have forced half-smiles on their faces, and upma, idli, kesari bath and a fragile truce on the table between them.

The meeting, reports say, was held at the instance of the high command, and any decision regarding a change of guard in Karnataka would also be taken by the high command. The see-through staginess of the show of unity between leaders warring over the terms of a power-sharing deal only draws attention to the invisible strings being pulled from Delhi.

If the Congress high command, fresh from the drubbing it led the party to in Bihar, is a shadowy puppeteer in Bengaluru, the BJP high command, high on its spate of victories in Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi and Bihar, is in-your-face everywhere. It has given up even the pretence of masking where the real power is concentrated — the party of Modi and Shah has functioned without a party president after the term of the last president ended in January 2024. In Parliament, treasury benches often erupt in chants of “Modi Modi” and BJP ministers and MPs seldom make speeches that do not pay obeisance to him.

Now look at another freeze frame — from Central Hall in Parliament, on Constitution Day. In it, PM Modi and LoP Rahul Gandhi stand and read from the Preamble, along with other leaders of government and Opposition and constitutional dignitaries. That Modi and Rahul are in the same frame is unusual and striking — because the two are not known to be on talking terms, because Modi labels Rahul’s party the “Muslim League-y Maowadi Congress” and Rahul accuses Modi of stealing election or “vote chori”.

It is possible to connect the dots between these snapshots from Bihar, Karnataka and Parliament. Taken together, they tell the story of a deliberative space that was always fragile, but is now, amid sharpening polarisation and unchecked institutional weakening, rapidly shrinking.

The crisis of the legislatures is showcased in Parliament most visibly, but it is linked to the more unnoticed erosion of debate and thinning substance of law-making in state assemblies across the country. They are functioning, more and more, as echo-chambers of executive authority.

This is, in turn, linked to the lack of deliberation inside parties, overrun by a high command culture that stifles possibilities of debate within. After the Bihar debacle, for instance, the Congress high command has already steered the post-mortem towards a blame-laying exercise that targets the EC, when it is not pointing fingers at the NDA’s poll-eve cash transfer scheme. The cash transfer was indeed controversial, but the Congress uses it to evade uncomfortable questions that lie closer home — such as why it failed to offer voters a big idea that could vault over the faultlines of caste and community.

A high command that consistently shirks discussion within is unlikely to convincingly lead the charge against the waning of deliberative spaces in the polity. Congressmen who are disdained and dominated inside their own party make unlikely campaigners for freedom of debate in other institutional spaces. In any case, in Parliament, the anti-defection law further ties MPs to their high command’s diktat and whim.

This picture is completed by the conspicuous freeze at the top that has a chilling effect on civil debate all the way down in the polity.

The breakdown of dialogue and reciprocity between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and LoP Rahul Gandhi has consequences — and costs. It makes any encounter or exchange between the two an apocalyptic, zero-sum event. It means that the middle ground has gone missing, and that the give-and-take of debate is replaced almost entirely by do-or-die point-scoring.

Till next time,

Vandita

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