The long descent of India’s parliamentary dignity

The decline of parliamentary discourse in India did not arrive with a bang; it came by erosion. Sentence by sentence, interruption by interruption, motive by motive. What we witness today in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha is not merely bad behaviour or theatrical excess. It is the steady erosion of an institutional ethic – the slow unlearning of restraint, respect, and responsibility that once defined the Indian Parliament as a moral theatre of democracy.

In recent times, parliamentary speech has become indistinguishable from street combat: slogans replacing sentences, accusations replacing arguments, placards substituting for persuasion. Leaders of both Treasury and Opposition benches have participated in this degradation. This is not a partisan failure; it is a collective one. When senior ministers reduce criticism to insinuation, or when Opposition leaders personalise disagreement to the point of delegitimisation, they signal to the rank and file that dignity is optional.

Parliamentary speech, once aspirational, is now mimetic: the worst behaviour is quickly learned, repeated, and normalised. The tragedy is not that disagreement has intensified – disagreement is the lifeblood of democracy – but that disagreement has been stripped of intellectual seriousness, civility, and proportion. Disruption has become the default setting of parliamentary engagement.

This was not always so. The Constituent Assembly, operating in a nation broken by Partition and uncertainty, treated speech as a civic duty rather than a political weapon. Disagreements were sharp, sometimes bruising, but rarely demeaning. The dignity of the House was not an abstraction; it was a shared inheritance. Members subordinated personal ambition to constitutional purpose, ideological fervour to institutional continuity. To speak in the House was to speak to history, not merely to one’s voter base or party leadership. What has changed over the last four decades is not simply the quality of individuals; parliamentary debate has migrated from deliberation to performance. Members now speak less with conviction and more to energise television studios and partisan echo chambers. The House has become the theatre of the absurd rather than a forum for intellectual discourse and lawmaking.

In this transformation, dignity becomes dispensable, and complexity becomes a liability. Language itself has hardened. Personal insinuation has replaced ideological critique. Motive is attacked where the argument should be tested. In recent years, we have seen parliamentarians questioning not just policies but the legitimacy, patriotism, or moral standing of opponents – most often without evidence. The idea that one can disagree without delegitimising the opponent has disappeared. This is a profound shift from earlier parliamentary culture, where adversaries recognised each other as constitutional equals even while contesting politics, policy, and principle.

The loss here is not merely aesthetic. Parliamentary discourse performs an educative function in a democracy as vast and unequal as India’s. It models how power speaks, how disagreement is handled, how minorities are heard, and how authority is constrained. When Parliament descends into insult and obstruction, it licenses similar behaviour across the political ecosystem – from state legislatures to universities, from television debates to social media exchanges. The rot travels downward. It is tempting to attribute this decline to a generational fall from the lofty standards of the founding era. The early Parliament operated in a context where institutions were fragile, and legitimacy had to be earned daily. Today’s leaders across the aisles operate with a sense of entitlement worsened by ideological polarisation, where legitimacy is often presumed rather than cultivated. The disregard for their constituents has replaced the humility of constitutional responsibility.

Equally damaging is the erosion of cross-party conviviality. Earlier generations of parliamentarians disagreed fiercely but dined together, read one another’s work, and shared a common grammar of public reason. Today’s political class often inhabits hermetically sealed worlds. When there is no shared language, there can be no shared standards of debate. Restoring parliamentary dignity requires institutional courage. Leadership must value legislative competence. Presiding officers must enforce rules without fear or favour. Members must rediscover that interruption is not argument and shouting is not authority. Above all, Parliament must reclaim its role as the highest site of national reasoning, not merely the loudest arena of partisan assertion.

India’s Parliament once taught a diverse, newly independent nation how to disagree without disintegrating. That lesson is now at risk of being forgotten. The question is not whether the past was perfect – it was not – but whether the future can afford the debasing of Parliament. The question before the Members of Parliament is whether they still regard themselves as custodians of an institution they entered under oath, and the Republic that they temporarily represent. Democracy represents the interior architecture of power. Parliamentary discourse is one of its load-bearing pillars. If it continues to crack, the damage will not be confined to the Parliament alone. It will echo far beyond, into the habits of citizenship itself.

The writer is the the former civil servant enjoys traversing the myriad spaces of ideas, thinkers, and books.