There is a sleight of hand at the core of Indian democracy, repeated so often it now passes for normal. Once every five years, the citizen is briefly sovereign: courted by parties, venerated by leaders, drenched in the rhetoric of jan shakti and loktantra, people’s power and democracy. For that moment, the voter is king.
Then the ballots are counted, the winners declared and the citizen reverts, instantly and completely, to being a subject.
For the next five years, elected representatives take decisions that shape every aspect of life – taxation, infrastructure, education, healthcare, land, and law – without any meaningful citizen intervention. There is no continuous mechanism of accountability, no institutional channel for participation, no enforceable right to intervene between elections.
Call it what it is: not democracy, but an elective oligarchy, a ritualised transfer of power to a political class that, once installed, answers to almost no one.
Ritual of the vote
The vote is both the start and the limit of democratic participation in India. In many constituencies, it is also a transaction, shaped by cash, liquor, caste alignments, or manufactured communal fear.
The Centre for Media Studies estimated that parties and candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha election spent roughly Rs 100,000 crore, with a significant share that went towards influencing voters. In such conditions, sovereignty gives way to exchange – commercial or communal – by design.
Even a genuinely free vote leads to immediate disempowerment. The Constitution provides no mechanism for ordinary citizens to recall representatives, initiate legislation, veto laws, mandate referendums or enforce accountability between elections.
The courts offer recourse in theory, but remain structurally inaccessible to most Indians. Their record in delivering justice is unimpressive and in recent decades their credibility has been eroded. The Right to Information Act, 2005, once enabled transparency but has been hollowed out.
The media – the so-called Fourth Estate – stands largely captured, corporatised, and domesticated, reduced to a propaganda machine of the ruling party.
Protest on the street is routinely throttled by policing.
Taken together, few institutions today function as reliable democratic safeguards for the ordinary citizen.
The result is stark: a democracy of inputs, where citizens supply votes, and an oligarchy of outputs, where everything after the vote belongs to those who receive it.
How representatives became rulers
This was not the original promise of the Constitution. Its architects recognised the dangers of concentrated power. Yet the system they built – a Westminster model of parliamentary sovereignty, the anti-defection regime of 1985 and steady centralisation at the expense of local governance – has produced a political class with vast authority and scanty accountability.
The anti-defection law is central to this distortion. It compels MPs to vote as their party directs or lose their seat, effectively extinguishing legislative conscience. Representatives cease to speak for constituents and instead act as delegates of the party leadership. In practice, citizens vote not for individuals, but for decisions taken by a small, unelected party elite, for whom they did not vote.
Parliament, as a result, functions less as a deliberative forum and more as a ratifying mechanism. Real decisions are made in party high commands and executive offices; Parliament formalises them. Hence, laws of sweeping consequence pass with minimal debate, sometimes in minutes.
The 2020 farm laws, pushed through by voice vote, and the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution illustrate a pattern: procedure substitutes for deliberation. The citizen remains a spectator – formally sovereign, substantively powerless.
Over time, the state has also fortified itself against dissent. Laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act have been used to constrain activists, journalists, and civil society.
Protest, the most direct form of democratic expression, is frequently met with repressive policing. The legal architecture increasingly regulates participation rather than enabling it.
The proposed Delimitation Bill, 2026, followed the same logic. Expanding Parliament from 543 to 850 members aimed to multiply seats, but it did not deepen citizen power. It would have enlarged the political class – its reach, its patronage, its control – while the citizen remained, as before, outside the structure of decision-making.
The Delimitation Bill debate, and the defeat of the government, has opened a window. The national conversation is, briefly, about the structure of representation. The question is whether citizens and their advocates will seize this moment to push the conversation further – from the number of MPs to the accountability of MPs, from the mechanics of election to the mechanics of governance, from who represents us to how we represent ourselves.
Spectators in theatre of democracy
Between elections, the Indian citizen’s role is largely that of a spectator. Parliament appears as theatre – noise, walkouts, little deliberation. Constituency politics reduces MPs to patronage brokers: inaugurations, symbolic presence, selective favours. Welfare arrives, if at all, through layers of discretion, mediated by middlemen, paperwork, and entrenched hierarchies that often block access before benefits reach the citizen.
For most, especially the poor, rural, marginalised, and tribal, this is the lived reality. Constitutional promises of equality, dignity, and opportunity remain aspirational. The political class, insulated from these failures by its own parallel world of privilege, rarely bears their consequences. The distance between rulers and ruled is not just economic but also structural.
When that gap becomes visible, the response is rarely reform. It is spectacle: new schemes, symbolic legislation, calibrated polarisation and the manufacture of external or internal adversaries to redirect public attention.
Even institutional changes framed as reform tend to expand political capacity rather than citizen control, leaving the underlying deficit of accountability untouched.
Participatory democracy
It is time to move the conversation from the question of who represents us to the question of how we govern ourselves. This is the transition from representative democracy – a system designed for an era when citizens could not practically participate in governance – to participatory democracy, a system that uses every available institutional mechanism to return sovereignty to its rightful owners.
The tools of participatory democracy are not theoretical. They exist. They function. They have transformed the political cultures of the countries that have adopted them. India need not invent them from scratch. It need only have the political will to import them – and the citizens’ movement to demand that will.
The right to recall
The most basic accountability mechanism missing from Indian democracy is the right of citizens to remove an elected representative before the end of their term. Currently, an MP elected on a particular platform can, within days of election, do the exact opposite of what they promised – cross the floor, support governments they campaigned against, vote for bills that harm their constituents, vanish entirely from the constituency – and face no consequence until the next election, five years later.
The right to recall, practised in various forms in the United States (at the state level), in Switzerland, in parts of Latin America, allows a defined percentage of voters in a constituency to trigger a fresh election if their representative fails to meet the basic terms of their mandate.
This is not a mechanism for the political class to weaponise against each other – the percentage threshold and procedural safeguards prevent that. It is a mechanism for citizens to exercise ongoing sovereignty, not just periodic franchise.
Panchayati Raj institutions in several Indian states already have provisions for recall of elected Panchayat leaders. There is no principled reason why this cannot be extended to MLAs and MPs.
Citizens’ initiative and referendum
A democracy that cannot consult its citizens on the major decisions that shape their lives is a democracy in name only. Switzerland has held over 600 national referendums since 1848. Virtually every major question – from immigration policy to financial legislation to constitutional amendments – has been put to the direct vote of Swiss citizens. The country is not paralysed. It is, by most measures, one of the best-governed nations on earth.
India has never held a single national referendum. Decisions of staggering consequence – the integration of Jammu and Kashmir, the Emergency of 1975, demonetisation, the abrogation of Article 370, the Citizenship Amendment Act – were made by the executive and legislature without any formal consultation of the citizenry.
Some of these may have had popular support; many did not. But in no case were the people asked. They were told. They were managed. They were presented with fait accompli and expected to ratify or absorb.
Citizens’ initiative – the right of a defined number of citizens to place a proposed law or constitutional amendment directly before the voters – would transform the relationship between the citizen and the state. It would compel politicians to take seriously the expressed preferences of their constituents on matters that powerful interests would prefer to keep off the formal agenda.
It would allow communities affected by specific policies – environmental regulations, land acquisition, educational curricula – to have a formal democratic say in those policies, rather than being reduced to protest and petition.
Citizens’ assemblies
Beyond the referendum, which is a binary instrument, the most exciting development in democratic theory and practice over the past two decades is the citizens’ assembly – a randomly selected, demographically representative body of ordinary citizens convened to deliberate on a specific complex question and produce recommendations.
Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies on abortion rights and same-sex marriage produced recommendations that the Parliament then put to referendum. Both passed. The assemblies succeeded where the political process had failed for decades – precisely because their participants were ordinary citizens, not professional politicians, not lobbyists, not party operatives.
They had no careers to protect, no donors to please, no constituencies of ideology to satisfy. They could, and did, reason carefully about difficult questions and arrive at nuanced, considered conclusions.
Citizens’ assemblies have been convened in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Iceland, and dozens of other countries. They are not a replacement for Parliament. They are a complement to it – a mechanism for bringing the genuine wisdom of ordinary people into democratic processes that have been captured by professional political elites.
In a country as large and diverse as India, citizens’ assemblies at the state and local level could be transformative instruments for participatory governance.
Mandatory participatory budgeting
Porto Alegre, Brazil, pioneered participatory budgeting in 1989 – a system in which citizens directly decide how a portion of the municipal budget is allocated. The model has since spread to over 3,000 cities worldwide, including experiments in the United Kingdom, South Korea and Kenya.
Where it has been implemented well, it has increased civic engagement, reduced corruption and improved the quality and equity of public spending by directing resources toward the priorities of communities rather than the preferences of contractors and political networks.
India has Gram Sabhas, village assemblies guaranteed by the 73rd Constitutional Amendment, that are, in theory, exactly this kind of participatory institution. In practice, they are widely dormant, irregularly convened, poorly attended, and systematically starved of the resources and authority they would need to be meaningful.
Reviving and empowering the Gram Sabha, and creating equivalent institutions for urban wards, is not a constitutional innovation. It is a constitutional obligation that has been comprehensively evaded.
The Right to legislative initiative
Beyond recall and referendum, citizens should have the formal right to propose legislation – to place a draft bill before the Parliament by collecting a defined number of signatures, compelling the legislature to at least debate and vote on it.
This right exists in the European Union (the European Citizens’ Initiative), in 17 American states, in Switzerland, in Italy and in Austria. It is a recognition that the legislative agenda of a Parliament should not be the exclusive property of the government and the opposition parties. It should also include what the citizens themselves want addressed.
In India, if citizens petition Parliament, they are carrying out a symbolic act that has no binding consequences. A petition, however many signatures it carries, does not compel any action.
The difference between a petition and a legislative initiative is the difference between begging and claiming.
The problem of political will
The obvious objection to all of these ideas is that the political class, which would have to legislate these mechanisms into existence, has no interest in doing so. The right to recall is an existential threat to every sitting politician. Referendums take power away from Parliament. Citizens’ assemblies bypass party structures. Participatory budgeting reduces the discretionary power that is the currency of political patronage.
Political reform never comes from those who benefit from the existing political arrangement. It comes from organised citizens who create political costs for inaction that exceed the political costs of reform.
The history of democratic expansion everywhere – the extension of franchise to women, to the propertyless, to formerly colonised peoples; the establishment of free speech and assembly; the right to organise and to strike – is a history of citizen movements that made the status quo untenable for those in power.
None of these rights were gifts from magnanimous rulers. They were wrested from resistant establishments by people who refused to remain spectators of their own governance.
India has a rich tradition of such movements – from the Independence struggle to the JP movement to the Right to Information campaign to the anti-corruption mobilisations of 2011. What it lacks is a sustained, institutionally sophisticated movement for democratic reform that translates popular frustration with politics into a specific, coherent, constitutional agenda. The energy is there. It dissipates because it has no programmatic home.
More MPs will not serve democracy
The proposal to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 members is, in this light, not merely expensive and pointless. It is actively regressive. It takes a system in which citizens are already overwhelmed by the scale, opacity and inaccessibility of the political class and makes it larger. It creates more nodes in a network of political power that citizens cannot access, more intermediaries through which the state’s resources are filtered and diminished, more masters to whom the citizen is nominally connected and practically irrelevant.
The answer to the crisis of Indian democracy is not more representatives. It is more representation – a fundamentally different thing. Representation is what exists when citizens have genuine, formal, ongoing mechanisms to shape the decisions that govern their lives.
It is what exists when an elected official knows that their constituents can recall them, can place alternative proposals before the public, can convene assemblies that speak with democratic authority, can directly allocate a portion of the taxes they pay.
What exists when democracy is not a ritual performed every five years but a practice embedded in the daily life of self-governing communities. India’s Constitution begins with three words: We, the People. Seventy-five years later, the people are waiting to be let in.
The price of letting them in is not a larger Parliament. It is a humbler one.
Writer and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO, Petronet India Limited and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management. His most recent book is The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir
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