The recent controversy with regard to certain ‘words’ that have ostensibly been designated as unparliamentary by the Parliament Secretariat would have been laughable had it not been portentous. There were also reports of a notification banning any protests in the precincts of the Parliament House. However, it was later clarified that the latter order was passed in 2001.
Nonetheless, what this underscores is the continuing attempt to emasculate the legislature further, which, in any case, has become practically redundant over the decades to the governance processes of the nation.
The founding fathers of the modern Indian Republic had designed the Indian constitutional scheme that envisaged that the ‘legislature’ would lie at the heart of the Indian democratic experiment. The Westminster Model that envisaged that the executive would be both the progeny of the legislature and consequently accountable to it, as a template has been systematically whittled down over the years, to a point where it has become practically redundant if not a dead letter.