The Indian Parliament met this February with all the usual ceremony—the grand halls, the formal procedures, and the weight of representing 1.4 billion people. Then Rahul Gandhi stood to question the government about the 2020 Ladakh standoff, chaos erupted, and within minutes the session collapsed into adjournments and accusations. Another day, another failure. At what point do we stop calling this democracy and start calling it what it actually is—political theatre masquerading as governance?

This is not about partisan preference. It is about a legislature that has systematically dismantled its own capacity for serious work. The 17th Lok Sabha sat for just 274 days across its entire term, the shortest of any full-term Parliament since independence. During last year’s Monsoon Session, the Lok Sabha functioned at 29% of scheduled time. Think about that. If you showed up to work and accomplished less than a third of what you were supposed to do, you would be fired. 

But raw numbers only tell part of the story. What they do not capture is how deliberately this dysfunction has been engineered. Opposition parties have calculated that disruption generates more attention than debate, so they storm the well and force adjournments. The ruling party has calculated that less parliamentary time means less scrutiny, so they have cut sitting days nearly in half compared to earlier decades. Both sides can justify their behaviour by pointing at the other, and meanwhile the institution rots.

Watch how legislation actually moves through Parliament now. A bill gets introduced. Maybe there are a few hours of debate, often interrupted by........

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