Dear Express Reader, Parliament was disrupted this week — in a role reversal of sorts, by members of the ruling party and government, whose responsibility it is to ensure its smooth functioning. Rahul Gandhi must apologise for defaming India abroad, BJP ministers and MPs demanded, as they stalled proceedings in the House, or else. Rahul's comments in London on India's democracy being under pressure and in danger were not new. For some time now, he has been talking of the cramping of freedoms and the capture of institutions by the BJP-led government. His remarks could be said to be too dire, you could also say that they frame a disconnect with the street that shows up in the dipping Congress tallies on election scoreboards. And as we said in our editorial, they constitute "intellectual and political dead-ends" — where do you go, what is left for politics to do, once you declare that all is bent and broken? In polarised times, such statements create blind alleys, rather than expand the middle ground, they alienate more than they engage. But having said that, you would have to do a DK Barooah for the BJP — "BJP is India, India is BJP" — to consider them anti-national. As our editorial also said, "Certainly the BJP has the right to interrogate Gandhi on his statements of a democracy under siege, and to criticise their dire tone and tenor. But to paint them as an 'insult to India'… is, quite simply, overblown". But that Rahul has still not been allowed to respond in Parliament to the loud furore over his comments, and that the House is being locked down repeatedly lest the ratcheted-up political noise levels should fall, doesn't just say some sobering things about the BJP's heavy-handed politics. It also circles back to a larger and longer problem and predicament of Parliament. In the Sunday Express, P Chidambaram laid out several markers of an institution in decline - in the last many months, the chair has rejected every motion for a discussion under Rule 267, invoked for bringing matters of urgent public importance to the attention of the House; the prime minister does not answer questions in Parliament and is, in fact, rarely present in either House; there are fewer sittings, more disruptions, less debate. "We can begin to contemplate a time when Parliament will 'sit' on a few days in a year, debate nothing, and pass all the Bills amidst the din and the disruption", Chidambaram wrote. The dysfunction in Parliament may have grown and sharpened on the watch of the BJP government, but it has certainly not been created by it. A pointer to its more enduring crisis, which makes its current shutdown so much easier, is this: The performance of a party or an individual MP almost never becomes an issue in their election campaigns. Quite simply, there are no evident electoral penalties or rewards, no questions asked when politicians go to the people, for taking Parliament seriously, or failing to. While it is not a good idea to put all form and practice in a constitutional system to the election test, the silence on the institution of Parliament at the time of the election of people's representatives in a parliamentary democracy rings especially loud, or it should. This inattention has several consequences and complicities. At its heart is a restricted notion of representation and an ill-defined idea of accountability. The growing presidentialisation of a parliamentary system, the concentration of power at the top of the government, which has picked up speed in the time of the dominance of the Modi-BJP, is both a cause and effect. The fuss over what Rahul Gandhi said about India abroad will die down. But the questions that it has underlined about our Parliament and us will stay, and return to haunt. Till next week, Vandita | 
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