Indian Parliament: Why Democracy Needs Reform

A well-functioning legislature is a necessary condition for a well-functioning modern democracy. By that measure, India’s democracy is in poor shape. Consider the recently concluded 2026 Monsoon Session of the Lok Sabha. The Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Kiren Rijiju, said the productivity of the session—a ratio of time spent on the House’s business to time lost to protests, sloganeering, and adjournments—was 19 per cent. The Minister was disingenuous when he pinned this on the opposition alone. A recurring feature of the Lok Sabha in recent years is that the government benches have disrupted proceedings as much as, and sometimes more than, the opposition.

The popular press and the commentariat decry this parliamentary logjam even as they shout at each other on evening news. But to view this paralysis, as they and much of the middle class do, merely as a failure of political morality is to conflate the symptom with the disease. The Westminster model, as it evolved and was adopted in India, skews political power heavily towards the executive. Only the executive can introduce Bills, and only it controls the legislative calendar. It decides when Parliament meets and for how long. Exceptions exist but are too weak to matter.

When a legislative body operates under such artificially scarce time, with its schedule and duration dictated entirely by the ruling executive, disruption ceases to be a mere breach of etiquette. It becomes the only operational lever available to an opposition trying to be heard. Or, as seen in recent times, it becomes effective theatre for the treasury benches themselves to shut down the last forum where the government can be held accountable.

Politicians respond to incentives like everyone else. In their world, visibility before voters and party bosses is what incentive looks like. The executive that controls the legislative calendar rations this resource for its own benefit. For a ruling party intent on ramming through sweeping legislation, this engineered scarcity is political currency: it is structurally incentivised to use the clock, and the chaos that consumes it, as a pretext to bypass scrutiny of important Bills altogether.

The opposition, facing a brute majority, quickly learns that bleeding the clock is the only effective veto it has. The resulting gridlock, then, is not a tragic breakdown of parliamentary norms. It is exactly how a centralised, winner-take-all system operates under the stress of governing an impossibly vast and divergent republic.

The Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Kiren Rijiju, said the productivity of the session was at 19 per cent, and blamed this on the opposition. | Photo Credit: Sansad TV/ANI Video Grab

Consider the passage of the Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill during the 2026 Monsoon Session. This was legislation that fundamentally altered the framework for natural resource extraction, directly affecting the fiscal rights, local economies, and environmental landscape of mineral-rich States. Yet the Union government pushed this sweeping law through the Lok Sabha without substantive discussion, amid chaos and heavy sloganeering by the opposition.

Members were denied a structured debate to weigh or interrogate the Bill’s provisions before it was passed. This is no longer the exception; it has become the rule. Even the three Farm Laws of 2020, which directly affected the livelihoods of over half the population, were passed without serious discussion amid the din of sloganeering. That they had to be repealed the following year appears to have taught floor managers nothing.

This is what the current dynamic, in which the executive effectively runs Parliament, produces. Floor time is artificially constricted, the schedule is weaponised, and legislative deliberation is replaced by legislative ambush. Complex and contentious Bills are introduced with negligible notice because the executive treats the legislature as a hurdle to cross. Instead of a system in which the legislature legislates and the executive carries that out faithfully, we have ended up with one in which the legislature rubber-stamps whatever the executive demands. These Bills often run into hundreds of pages that radically alter everything from taxation to resource allocation. Yet they go undebated, and are passed by voice vote.

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What, then, is the job of an MP in such a system? They cannot vote by their conscience, since the anti-defection law forbids it. They must vote mechanically as their party boss directs, even against their constituents’ interests. They cannot discuss or deliberate, since nothing is discussed and there is no one to persuade, or be persuaded by. They are reduced to little more than voting cattle: a shouting proxy for party bosses who have decided that disrupting Parliament and running down the clock is good strategy. In such an environment, the legislature ceases to function as a co-equal branch of government. It no longer scrutinises power, let alone remains the fountain that grants power to the other branches.

The original sin here is this: the legislative calendar does not come from the collective will of the House, nor does it follow a predictable, neutral administrative process in which a policy framework is finally ready for MPs to vote on. Instead, the power to summon Parliament and set its agenda rests entirely with the ruling executive. This lets a handful of party bosses wield the timetable purely for their own political purposes.

Observe how, over the last decade or so, the schedule has bent to accommodate the electoral calendar. When a crucial State election looms, uncomfortable debates are quietly postponed. When a national crisis threatens to expose executive failure, a session can be delayed, shortened, or abruptly prorogued. In the 2026 Monsoon Session, the opposition’s demand for a statement from the Home Minister on the police response to the student protests over the NEET paper leak went unmet by the time the session concluded.

Conversely, when the ruling party needs to command the news cycle, a session can be timed to coincide with ideologically resonant moments. On the final day of the 2026 Monsoon Session, even as the opposition’s demand for that statement remained unanswered, the House marked 150 years of Vande Mataram with a full recitation of the song, days after Parliament had cleared a Bill granting it statutory protection akin to the national anthem. The schedule of Parliament, under these conditions, ceases to be a framework for national governance and instead becomes a roadmap for partisan survival. By treating parliamentary time as private political capital, party bosses ensure that the House convenes and functions only when it suits their immediate electoral arithmetic.

The first necessary intervention to make Parliament work better is to permanently sever the executive from owning the legislative calendar. The power to summon the House and set its agenda must be stripped from the Cabinet and the Speaker, who is, after all, a partisan. It should be handed to an independent, non-partisan parliamentary bureaucracy. The United States Senate Parliamentarian offers a model; ours could be a more powerful version, empowered to command the calendar outright.

The legislative calendar is controlled by the executive, allowing it to manipulate the agenda and time frame for its purposes. | Photo Credit: Ravi Choudhary/PTI

But merely changing who controls the schedule is insufficient if time itself remains finite. We must abandon the archaic relic of discrete parliamentary sessions altogether. This is a hangover from a pre-modern era, when men from faraway places had to travel by horse carriage to Westminster to discuss the issues of the day. We no longer live in such an era, and neither should our politics. The House must operate continuously through the year, sitting round the clock with live broadcast on the parliamentary channels. When floor time is practically unlimited, physical disruption loses its tactical utility. A ruling party can no longer use the chaos of a dying session to rush a Bill through. An opposition cannot run down a clock that never stops ticking. By expanding time, we neutralise disruption as a political weapon.

A continuous House requires a radical redesign of how laws are passed. The current system relies on a high-pressure, single-day division of votes, which makes it easy for party whips to corral their members. Imagine, instead, a rolling, asynchronous voting mechanism. Every Bill is assigned a mandatory deliberation window of 90 to 180 days, depending on its complexity. Members are not forced to vote on a specific afternoon; they may cast their vote at any point during the window, and change it exactly once before the deadline expires. If a compelling counter-argument surfaces on the floor on day 60, an MP who voted one way on day 10 could reverse course. This is a system built on the premise that a good argument can actually change a mind.

There is democratic virtue in such an expanded window. The authors of The Federalist Papers understood this implicitly in 1788. Alexander Hamilton warned repeatedly against the sudden impulses of legislative majorities, arguing that the structural design of a republic must allow the cool and deliberate sense of the community to ultimately prevail. Passion is often unthinking and fast; wisdom is exasperatingly slow. We want the laws that govern us to be wise, not passionate.

A single afternoon vote, as happens now in the Lok Sabha, guarantees that partisan passion dominates the floor. A rolling window of six months forces a different dynamic. It breaks the tribal groupthink and creates space for reason and data to emerge. An elected representative can actually read the fine print. And because the House operates round the clock, any member with a long speech to make can make it without the Speaker holding the clock against them—reasoning they owe their constituents.

When MPs are forced to state the case for their vote, they must weigh the interests of constituents they currently barely consider, since they vote as their party boss directs. Before making that floor speech, which will be televised, they can and should consult subject-matter experts and gauge their constituents’ reaction. The institution becomes a genuine cooling chamber that deliberates, rather than an arena for engineered outrage. It becomes, once again, a forum for legislative wisdom.

Critics of this expanded voting window will point immediately to a core feature of the Westminster system: a government survives only as long as it commands a majority in the Lower House, and the executive cannot be left forever guessing whether it will suddenly collapse. This is precisely why party whips exist even in mature democracies without draconian anti-defection laws. The ruling Cabinet needs predictability to govern. If MPs are free to vote however they wish over a rolling six-month period, how does a government secure its own survival.

The answer lies in redefining the scope of the anti-defection law. The current law applies a sledgehammer to every legislative act, treating a vote on a minor procedural amendment exactly like a vote of no-confidence. This is an overreach. The anti-defection mandate should be restricted strictly to votes that determine the government’s actual survival.

MPs should be legally bound by the party whip only during a formal trust vote or a no-confidence motion. The whip, on the ruling coalition’s side, may also direct MPs on the passage of the annual finance Bill. For all other legislative business, the whip is rendered powerless. Under this bifurcated system, the government retains its structural stability, as it does now, while the individual MP is freed to vote according to their actual contract with their constituents, using the expanded time scale and rolling window to weigh each Bill on its merits. The executive keeps its stability. The legislature regains its agency.

A rolling window instead of a short afternoon vote would allow MPs to break out of a tribal groupthink, and vote in their constituencies’ interests. | Photo Credit: Sansad TV/ANI Video Grab

What of genuine emergencies? The Constitution currently allows the executive to issue ordinances, but only when Parliament is not in session. Governments routinely abuse this loophole to bypass legislative scrutiny altogether. A continuous Parliament eliminates that excuse. The state still needs agility during crises, and the solution is straightforward: the government can introduce an emergency Bill that takes provisional effect immediately upon tabling, but it cannot escape the rolling voting mechanism. The mandatory countdown begins the moment it is introduced. The government gets its immediate action; it is stripped of any ability to dodge a floor test.

The current system leaves little room for an MP to be a good legislator, so the MP feels the need to be seen doing something instead. This is why MPs interfere in executive functions within their constituency—road-building projects, for instance—even though these are often the domain of State and local governments and MPs technically have no say in them. Power denied at the highest lawmaking body in the country expresses itself in local executive decisions.

A continuous House and a rolling vote would strip away this excuse. The MP’s job becomes legislating on behalf of constituents and nothing else. They are given ample time to read the legislation, the freedom to vote their conscience, and an unrestricted platform to explain their decision. If they still vote against their constituency’s interests, they must own that betrayal completely. They can no longer point a finger at the system.

The individual MP, under this system, becomes significantly more powerful: an actual legislator whose vote must be earned by the executive. At the same time, they become radically more accountable to voters, less a party man and more a true representative. Their political survival will depend on defending their specific voting record to the people who elected them, not on pleasing the Cabinet.

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We frequently lament the decline of our institutions. But institutions do not fail simply because of bad people; they fail because of bad incentives and poor system design. This model changes the relationship between voter, representative, and law. Under the current model, citizens outsource their political agency entirely. They vote once every five years, then watch helplessly as party bosses dictate their lives from a distant capital, reduced to spectators. A continuous House and a rolling vote would shatter this outsourcing. When a Bill is debated over six months, the constituency itself gets time to read it. Local communities can parse the fine print, calculate the cost or benefit to their own geography, and arrive at a local consensus.

The MP would then act as a transmission line for that local consensus, ceasing to be a distant leader who decides on the people’s behalf and becoming a faithful messenger instead. If the constituency demands a specific vote, the MP would have no party whip to hide behind. They would have to vote the way their community wants, or face immediate political ruin.

What this does, in effect, is give people a greater say in the laws that are passed and the governments they elect, while confining the executive to the role of executing those laws. That is how democracy was meant to work in the first place.

R.S. Nilakantan is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide.