Parliament debate on Operation Sindoor shows Indian democracy is ‘reeling’ away

At 10.32 pm on Monday, Rajasthan MP Hanuman Beniwal rose to speak in the Lok Sabha. Six minutes in, the chair rang a bell to let him know that he was running out of time. This piqued the Jat leader.

“What has happened?” he asked. “You gave me a chance so late in the night anyway. It is certain that I won’t be in the newspapers tomorrow. I will have to make do with social media.”

Beniwal’s reaction encapsulates how elected representatives seem to increasingly be approaching debates in Parliament. Rather than making substantive interventions, many MPs are choosing to deliver a series of snippets tailored for social media – specifically, video-sharing platforms like YouTube and Instagram.

This tendency was on full display during the much anticipated discussion on Operation Sindoor this week. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh set the tone for the debate by sidestepping the contentious issue of India losing aircraft during the strikes.

“We determine if a child has done well in an examination by looking at the results,” Singh argued. “Only his marks should matter to us. Not how many pencils he broke or how many pens he lost.”

The clever metaphor worked well for the mainstream media but not for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. The leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha...

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