Lok Sabha 2024: The return of the argumentative Indian

In ancient Athens, the clepsydra – a water clock used for timekeeping – was the chief protagonist in debate and democracy. In courthouses, it ensured that speakers and debaters selected at random from among the citizenry were granted equal time to deliberate and debate matters of policy.

In India, the clepsydra of deliberation has often favored the electoral winner: the ruling party. The last decade has seen Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party elbowing out from the deliberation table members of civil society, the Opposition and also India’s citizens.

The ruling coalition in Modi’s third term is indeed posturing strength – status quo in the cabinet, the re-election of the Lok Sabha speaker and an attempt to silence dissenting voices. However, with the new power-balance of the parliament, the administration’s attempt to steamroll criticism will not be quite so easy. There has already been an unprecedented election for the position of the speaker and pushback to the microphones of Opposition politicians in Parliament mysteriously going silent. The scales are being reset.

Deliberation is not merely a moral obligation but a political imperative. Besides allowing the pushes and pulls of diverse opinions that lead to collective wisdom being evolved, deliberation is critical in enhancing legitimacy and improving quality of decision making.

This was missing in the laws that were rammed through Parliament, especially during Narendra Modi’s second term. This unchecked unilateralism has eroded India’s ethos of debate and deliberation. Without these, democracy has become a one-time exercise of voting. The rituals remain, without the music that once brought them to life.

The last Lok Sabha witnessed merely 16% of bills being referred to parliamentary committees. By contrast, the second term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance saw 72% of bills being sent to committees for deliberation. Further, in the 17th Lok Sabha, more than 33% of the bills were passed with less than an hour of discussion. Significant legislation like the Women’s Reservation Act and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act were passed in under two days.

In his book, Sixteen Stormy Days, Tripurdaman Singh details the heated parliamentary proceedings that led to the very first amendment to India's Constitution – with fiery debates between Prime Minister Nehru and the Bharatiya Jan Sangh leader Syama Prasad Mukherjee. These debates had begun to seem unimaginable.

In another unprecedented move during the last Lok Sabha, a protest by the Opposition over a security breach led to the suspension in December of 141 Opposition members, some in absentia. This was emblematic of the low tolerance of deliberation and consensus in Parliament in the Modi era.

Independent India’s most robust institutions emerged from often forced deliberations and negotiations with the robust civil society. Enduring institutions like the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Institute of Economic Growth, the University Grants Commission and even the Planning Commission were shaped in deliberation with pressure groups, civil society and with funding from foreign foundations.

Even during the first term of the United Progressive Alliance, the Congress party’s critics were included in deliberations through the establishment of the National Advisory Committee – which ultimately built mechanisms like the Right to Information and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme.

In his essay Civil Society and Its New Enemies, former Czech President Václav Havel wrote, “Civil society is a…fragile, organism that [grows] over decades, if not centuries.” But over the last decade, the foreign funding licences of nearly 21,000 nonprofit organisations have been revoked. Prominent groups like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Centre for Policy Research and many critical grassroots organisations have been financially suffocated, systematically demonised and structurally dismantled.

A deliberative democracy is premised on equal representation and equality of opportunity to influence political decisions. In India, this leaves a lot to be desired in the context of gender, religion, caste and occupation. Women’s representation in the Lok Sabha remains static at 14%. Further, only 11% of MPs are under the age of 40. In a country with the median age of 28, the average age of our MPs has only been rising, now at 56.

Misinformation and political polarisation driven by the internet have characterised elections the world over. In this recent shift from information-asymmetry to information-ambiguity, the role of the state and media have played a dubious role in shrouding information.

For India’s democratic system to be truly deliberative, the Modi-led government needs to ensure equitable participation, lack of censorship and civil discussions with those who disagree with it. While Athenian assemblies are burgeoning on the internet, these engagements among people need to permeate to engagement with the state.

In his 2005 book, The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen suggested, “Where argument lives, scepticism thrives, and fundamentalism must inevitably fail.” The results of the recent election have brought back an era of coalition governments, which cannot thrive or even exist without healthy deliberation and debate between allies and Opposition.

Even as the ruling party attempts to dominate the narrative, the Opposition is finally pushing back with alternative ways of sharing its narratives – through press conferences and direct social media outreach. Times have changed.

Modi’s administration in its third term can, if it wishes to, embrace the pushes and pulls of deliberation. Or, it could find newer, more desperate ways to suppress it.

Medha Uniyal and Kartikeya Bhatotia are graduate students at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, studying democracy, politics and institutions.