There are books that record an era, and then there are books that interrogate the future. Hiren Mukherjee’s Portrait of Parliament: Reflections and Recollections (1952–77) belongs to the latter category. Written by one of my favourite parliamentarians, the book is a meditation on what Parliament means to a democracy and what happens to a democracy when Parliament itself begins to forget what it is meant to be.

Mukherjee sounded a warning that appears prophetic today: He lamented the growing “deterioration in parliamentary functioning” and cautioned that if Parliament failed to prize its own dignity, its powers, too, would be imperilled. At the time, many may have regarded it as the melancholic reflection of an old parliamentarian witnessing inevitable institutional change. Today, it reads more like a diagnosis.

Parliament was conceived not as an appendage of executive authority but as the sovereign arena where the nation could converse with itself. The executive had to govern and Parliament had to hold power accountable. Increasingly, however, Parliament appears to be losing its deliberative soul. The first symptom of decay is the concentration of power within the executive. Parliamentary........

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