THE new sunday express Voices Devdutt Pattanaik Dr Alka Pande Ajai Sahni Ravi Shankar Sheila Kumar Mata Amritanandamayi MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment january 4 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 Essay Crisis and Opportunity 2025 exposed how dangerously close Indian democracy has come to mistaking majoritarian efficiency for the noisy, argumentative soul that once gave it life and expressed the nation’s diversity (From left) Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Minister of Defence Rajnath Singh, Member of Lok Sabha Priyanka Gandhi Vadra D By Prabhu Chawla emocracy, in its most visceral and organic form, is not a monologue of agreement but a cacophony of competing aspirations. In a civilisation as ancient, polyphonic, and layered as India, the democratic experiment was never designed to be seamless; it was intended to be the friction that polishes the stone. A multicultural society, spanning linguistic, religious, and ethnic fault lines, manages its inherent contradictions not through silence, but through the noisy, often messy, institutionalisation of conflict. The Parliament, the federal assemblies, and the media are meant to be the safety valves where these pressures are released through dialogue. However, when the institutions designed to mediate these conflicts atrophy, the noise does not disappear. It metastasises into toxicity When the forum for debate becomes . a theatre of silence, democracy ceases to be a negotiation and becomes a diktat. As India navigated the turbulent waters of 2025, it found itself not merely in a state of political contestation, but in an existential deadlock where the mechanisms of dialogue had been systematically replaced by the mechanics of confrontation. The year was a testament to the fragility of a republic where the “will of the people” is increasingly interpreted as the “dominance of the majority”, leaving little room for the nuances of dissent that Nehru and Ambedkar had meticulously woven into the constitutional fabric. The imposition of President’s Rule in Manipur, a decision of profound federal consequence, was approved by the Lok Sabha after a mere 42 minutes of discussion. The Rajya Sabha saw bills passed without a division vote In retrospect, 2025 stands out as a year of institutional impasse, where the empty chair became a defining symbol of the profound deadlock between the treasury benches and the opposition. The paralysis of the Indian Parliament serves as the bleakest metric of this institutional decline. The statistical degradation of the legislative process was stark and undeniable. Continuing the ominous trend set by the Winter Session of 2024 where productivity in the Lok Sabha plummeted to 31 per cent and the Rajya Sabha to 32 per cent, the sessions of 2025 witnessed a near-total breakdown of the deliberative process. Official records from the PRS Legislative Research indicate that the first three sessions of 2025 sat for historically low durations, characterised by “minimum work and maximum confrontation”. While government floor managers cited technical productivity in certain sessions, the quality of that engagement revealed the depth of the rot. For instance, in the Budget Session, despite claims of high functional hours, critical legislative business was bulldozed with alarming speed. The imposition of President’s Rule in Manipur, a decision of profound federal consequence, was approved by the Lok Sabha after a mere 42 minutes of discussion. The Rajya Sabha, often the house of sober second thought, saw bills passed amidst din without a division vote. The “reasons for confrontation” were systemic rather than episodic. The ruling party emboldened by , repeated electoral successes and a fractured Opposition, adopted a posture of legislative belligerence, viewing parliamentary debate not as a constitutional necessity but as an obstruction to administrative efficiency Mallikarjun Kharge, the . Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, captured this sentiment in a moment of exasperation, stating, “The problem is a trust deficit. The whole session they did not have a discussion. How can we trust them? They want to kill democracy .” His words underscored a reality where the government refused to engage on contentious flashpoints, leaving the Opposition with disruption as its only remaining leverage. Yet, amidst this parliamentary paralysis, 2025 also witnessed a dramatic resurgence of electoral fortunes that redefined the political landscape. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, recovered its electoral mojo with resounding victories in both the Delhi and Bihar Assembly elections. These triumphs were not mere footnotes; they were seismic shifts that reasserted Modi’s image as an invincible winner and injected a fresh surge of confidence into the ruling dispensation. In Delhi, the BJP’s sweep securing 48 seats in the 70 member assembly shattered the Aam Aadmi Party’s (AAP) decade-long dominance, exposing the fragility of Kejriwal’s governance model built on freebies and welfare promises. The victory was particularly sweet as it came against a backdrop of anti-incumbency and urban disillusionment, with voters rewarding the BJP’s narrative of “double-engine governance” and national security . Modi himself descended into the campaign trail, addressing massive rallies where he thundered, “Delhi has rejected the politics of freebies and chosen development,” framing the win as a mandate for his vision of a corruption-free, aspirational India. This Delhi verdict was followed by an even more emphatic triumph in Bihar, where the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) crushed the Mahagathbandhan, with the BJP and its ally Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) together claiming a supermajority The Bihar battle was a master class . in coalition arithmetic and narrative dominance, where Modi’s personal interventions—through BILLS by Bulldozer In 2025, the government pushed through key legislation—on energy reforms, new cesses and tax changes, rural employment restructuring, and repealing outdated laws—at speed in the Parliament of India, often with curtailed debate and little committee scrutiny. Opposition walkouts and suspensions became routine, as numbers, not negotiation, drove outcomes. The pattern, more than the laws themselves, defined the year. Critics warned of a hollowing-out of parliamentary deliberation. Bills were passing faster than arguments—raising a blunt question about whether efficiency had begun to eclipse democracy. virtual road shows and strategic messaging on caste census and development—neutralised Rahul Gandhi’s aggressive push for social justice. These back-to-back electoral hat-tricks transformed the BJP’s body language from defensive to triumphalist. Party workers, who had been nursing wounds from the 2024 Lok Sabha setbacks, rediscovered their swagger. Amit Shah, the Home Minister and master strategist, declared post-Bihar, “This is the beginning of the end for dynastic politics. The people have spoken—Modi is unbeatable.” The ruling party’s newfound arrogance in Parliament, far from being unearned was now fortified by these democratic endorsements, allowing it to dismiss Opposition disruptions as the tantrums of electoral losers. The ideological fulcrum of the confrontation in 2025 was the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. While the Election Commission of India framed the SIR as a routine administrative exercise to purge “dead, shifted, and duplicate” entries, the Opposition viewed it as a weaponised demographic tool. In a political climate charged with suspicion, the SIR was branded by the INDIA bloc as a “covert NRC” (National Register of Citizens) aimed at disenfranchising minority demographics—specifically Muslims—under the guise of data hygiene. The controversy was not merely procedural; it was existential. In states like West Bengal and Assam, fears were stoked that the revision was a prelude to stripping millions of their voting rights. Rahul Gandhi, in a rare moment of piercing clarity during a truncated debate, lashed out at the government’s intent: “If you destroy the vote, you destroy the country You destroy the idea of India.” He argued . that the SIR was being used to execute “vote theft” on an industrial scale, altering the electorate to Turn to page 2