An opinion article, last month, in one of India’s main English dailies, summed up the emerging prospects succinctly: ‘A parliamentary majority is being used as a bulldozer to fashion an autocracy, the new India version of a presidential form of governance…The replacement, at the forthcoming inaugural [of the new Parliament building], of the real president of the Indian republic by the prime minister may symbolise more than the ego of an individual’.
I had, some years ago, read and put away Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book on the fate of democracies, happy in the thought that India did not find a mention in it. Little had I visualised a time when dexterous devices would be used in quest of the desired objective.
Our parliamentary system, crafted with some care, was sought to achieve law-making; accountability of the executive; approval of taxation proposals and control of national finances, and discussion of matters of public interest and concern. India, it said, ‘shall be a Union of States’ and the provisions of Part XI of the Constitution would govern the relations between the Union and the States.
