When Parliament Becomes a Spectacle, Democracy Begins to Lose Its Voice
"India is not a democracy anymore." It is a striking statement, and Manish Tewari knew exactly the debate it would trigger when he made it. The senior Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP argued that the institutions meant to represent the will of the people have become "all but redundant" and that the country is increasingly operating as a "two-horse system"—an all-powerful executive on one side and a judiciary that appoints its own judges on the other. His conclusion was just as dramatic: unless India's democratic framework is fundamentally reworked, Parliament will continue to drift away from the role the Constitution intended it to play. It is easy to dismiss such remarks as political hyperbole. That would also be the easiest way to avoid the larger question. Strip away the politics, and what remains is a serious concern about the health of India's democratic institutions. Democracies rarely collapse overnight. More often, they weaken quietly, as i...
