Modi-ism must evolve into institution-centred nation-building

Why in the News

The political and governing order built around the Prime Minister, given the name Modi-ism, is being tested against the constitutional settlement rather than only against its delivery record. The 2024 verdict returned the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with 240 seats and made coalition partners necessary, which qualified a leader centred mandate without rejecting it.

What is the governing order named Modi-ism?

1. About: Modi-ism is the name given to the political and governing order built around the Prime Minister. It is a method of acquiring power, exercising authority and defining the nation.
2. Named features: The order is built on eight elements: a commanding leader, a disciplined party organisation, civilisational assertion, centralised decision-making, technology-driven welfare, infrastructure-led development, high-energy national security and direct communication with citizens.
3. Central promise: The promise is a strong leader, a purposeful state and a stronger India.

What has the order actually delivered?

1. Political transformation: The BJP moved from being a major national formation to the central axis of Indian politics. It expanded beyond its traditional geographical and social constituencies and made leadership itself the principal electoral proposition.
2. The 2024 qualification: The BJP fell to 240 seats in 2024 and required its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners to form the government. The verdict chose continuity and restored the relevance of consultation, coalition and restraint.
3. Delivery at scale: Infrastructure construction, digital public platforms, direct benefit transfers, financial inclusion, sanitation, housing, electrification and welfare delivery at scale strengthened the state’s capacity to reach citizens.
4. Poverty measurement: NITI Aayog estimated multidimensional poverty at 11.28 per cent in 2022-23, against 29.17 per cent in 2013-14. The methodology is contested, the improvement in delivery is not.
5. Political containment: The order contained the undue proliferation of regional politics to some degree.
6. Source of appeal: The order speaks in the language of aspiration, national confidence and civilisational recovery. Citizens long frustrated by delay, indecision and fragmented authority respond to a government promising speed and scale.

Why is effectiveness not a sufficient test of democratic government?

1. The five charges: Critics allege that the order seeks to weaken pluralism, dilute socialism, replace rights with governmental charity, capture institutions and ultimately alter the Constitution.
2. The counter position: Supporters dismiss these charges as partisan hostility or as resistance to India’s cultural resurgence. Both positions are too absolute, since constitutional character must be judged through the actual exercise of power rather than through slogans.
3. Evidence against dismantling: Elections remain fiercely competitive, governments change in the States, Opposition parties govern substantial parts of the country, and courts continue to examine executive action and enforce fundamental rights.
4. The Preamble ruling: In November 2024 the Supreme Court rejected petitions challenging the inclusion of the words socialist and secular in the Preamble.
5. The real risk: A Constitution can be weakened without its words being formally deleted. Institutions may remain intact on paper as their independence, credibility and conventions erode.
6. What sustains democracy: Democracy rests on five supports beyond periodic elections: restraints on power, respect for dissent, parliamentary accountability, federal balance and equal citizenship.

What do the pluralism and socialism debates actually turn on?

1. Pluralism: Religious freedom has not been legally abolished. Majoritarian mobilisation and inflammatory language make minorities feel conditionally accepted.
2. The distinction drawn: Cultural nationalism is constitutionally legitimate. Cultural supremacy is not.
3. Equal citizenship: The republic belongs without qualification to every citizen. Equal citizenship cannot depend on religion, political loyalty or conformity with a preferred account of national identity.
4. What socialism does not mean: Constitutional socialism does not demand a return to the licence-permit raj, hostility to private enterprise or indiscriminate state ownership.
5. What socialism does mean: It requires social and economic justice, equality of opportunity and protection against degrading deprivation.

Why must welfare reach a citizen as a right rather than as a gift?

1. The presentation problem: Statutory entitlements are politically presented as personal gifts from a leader. Food support, employment guarantees, housing, scholarships and social security are public obligations financed by citizens and delivered under law.
2. The ordering principle: Rights-based governance must complement beneficiary politics rather than be displaced by it. A citizen must remain a rights-holder rather than a grateful beneficiary.
3. What technology fixes: Technology reduces leakage and accelerates delivery.
4. What technology creates: Citizens excluded by failed authentication, inaccurate databases or administrative discretion need accessible remedies.
5. The four safeguards: Welfare requires enforceable standards, grievance redress, social audits and legislative scrutiny.

What does the record on Parliament and appointments show?

1. Speed of legislation: During the seventeenth Lok Sabha, 58 per cent of bills were passed within two weeks of introduction.
2. Committee referral: Only 16 per cent of bills were referred to parliamentary committees.
3. Budget scrutiny: Around 80 per cent of the Union Budget was voted without discussion between 2019 and 2023.
4. Political funding: The Supreme Court decision striking down the electoral bond scheme established that secrecy in political funding had crossed a constitutional boundary.
5. Election commissioner appointments: The law governing the appointment of election commissioners gives the executive a majority on the selection committee, which has raised concerns about perceived independence.
6. The test for autonomy: Institutional autonomy depends on more than technical legality. It requires transparent appointments, procedural fairness and visible distance from partisan command, so independence is protected in public perception as well as in fact.

What corrections would a shift to institution-centred nation-building require?

1. Parliament: Parliament must recover serious deliberation, committee scrutiny and control over public expenditure.
2. Federalism: Federal consultation must precede major decisions affecting the States.
3. Appointments and agencies: Appointments to constitutional and regulatory bodies should command cross-party credibility. Investigative agencies must be demonstrably even-handed.
4. Welfare and discourse: Welfare delivery must be joined to enforceable rights, and political discourse must replace habitual polarisation with constitutional fraternity.
5. The next development phase: The eight stated goals are productive employment, competitive manufacturing, stronger small enterprises, higher farm incomes, quality public education, accessible healthcare, liveable cities and climate resilience.
6. Party institutionalisation: No durable national party can remain indefinitely dependent on one personality. It needs empowered ministers, credible regional leaders, internal debate and an orderly culture of succession.

Challenges to Institution-Centred Nation-Building

1. Executive control of the legislative calendar: A ruling coalition can clear the chamber of dissent before a contested bill is taken up. Eg. In December 2023, 146 members were suspended across both Houses, the largest mass suspension since Independence, and the Telecommunications Bill, 2023 was passed with the near entire opposition absent.
2. A vacant Deputy Speaker’s chair: Article 93 mandates the election of a Deputy Speaker, and the post has been left unfilled for years. Eg. The post lay vacant through the entire seventeenth Lok Sabha and into the eighteenth, so a member from the Speaker’s own panel of chairpersons presided over the no-confidence motion against the Speaker in March 2026.
3. Discretionary gatekeeping on removal motions: Section 3 of the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 uses the word may, so the presiding officer may refuse a removal motion even when the numerical threshold is met. Eg. In April 2026 a notice signed by 193 opposition members seeking removal of the Chief Election Commissioner was refused admission in both Houses without stated reasons.
4. The Money Bill route: Certifying a bill as a Money Bill removes the Rajya Sabha’s power to amend it and places the certification beyond ordinary challenge. Eg. The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 was passed as a Money Bill, and the correctness of that certification remains before a larger bench of the Supreme Court.
5. Bypassed pre-legislative consultation: Draft legislation is often introduced without the public comment period the executive’s own policy prescribes. Eg. The Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy of 2014 requires draft bills to be placed in the public domain for thirty days, and this step is routinely skipped.
6. Federal consultation deficit: Consultative federal forums exist on paper and meet rarely. Eg. The Inter-State Council, constituted under Article 263, met only once between 2016 and 2024.

Conclusion

Effectiveness alone cannot settle the constitutional character of a government, and a Constitution can be hollowed out without a word of its text being altered. The productive core of the order, decisive leadership, infrastructure, digital innovation, credible defence capability and measurable delivery, should continue. What must change is the shift from leader-centred mobilisation to institution-centred nation-building, carried by parliamentary deliberation, federal consultation, cross-party credibility in appointments and welfare delivered as enforceable right. The choice is between an order disciplined by the Constitution and one that seeks to rise above it.

What is Parliamentary Accountability?

1. About: Parliamentary accountability is the set of procedures through which the legislature compels the executive to explain, justify and answer for the use of public power and public money.
2. Rationale: Article 75(3) makes the Council of Ministers collectively responsible to the House of the People, so the executive holds office only as long as it retains the confidence of the elected chamber.
3. Deliberative instruments: Question Hour, Zero Hour, calling attention motions, adjournment motions, censure motions and the no-confidence motion allow members to force the government to respond on the floor.
4. Financial instruments: Demands for Grants, the Appropriation Bill and the Finance Bill are the points at which the House sanctions expenditure and taxation.
5. Committee instruments: Twenty-four Department-related Standing Committees examine bills, demands for grants and ministry performance, and three financial committees, the Public Accounts Committee, the Estimates Committee and the Committee on Public Undertakings, audit spending after the fact.

Key Concerns Regarding Parliamentary Accountability

1. A presiding officer with party ties: In the Westminster model the Speaker severs party ties on election. India has never adopted that convention, so the presiding officer remains a party member and rules on motions that affect the party’s government.
2. Non-justiciable proceedings: Article 122 bars courts from inquiring into the validity of proceedings on the ground of alleged irregularity of procedure, which places most decisions of the Chair beyond review.
3. The whip and individual conscience: The anti-defection provisions of the Tenth Schedule attach disqualification to a vote against the party whip, so a member’s floor vote records the party’s position rather than the member’s scrutiny.
4. Recommendatory committee output: Standing Committee reports carry no binding force, and the government is under no obligation to accept or even reply to a recommendation.
5. Effective majority thresholds: Removal of the Speaker under Article 94(c) requires a majority of all then members, which makes removal practically impossible whenever the ruling coalition holds a comfortable majority.

Constitutional Framework Governing Parliamentary Accountability

1. Article 93: Requires the House of the People to choose a Speaker and a Deputy Speaker from among its members.
2. Article 94: Fixes the tenure, resignation and removal of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker.
3. Article 105: Defines the powers, privileges and immunities of the Houses and their members.
4. Article 112: Requires the annual financial statement of estimated receipts and expenditure to be laid before Parliament.
5. Article 113: Requires estimates other than charged expenditure to be submitted to the House as Demands for Grants.
6. Article 114: Provides that no money may be withdrawn from the Consolidated Fund except under an Appropriation Act.
7. Article 118: Empowers each House to make rules regulating its own procedure and conduct of business.
8. Article 148: Establishes the Comptroller and Auditor General, whose audit reports form the basis of the Public Accounts Committee’s work.
9. Article 263: Provides for an Inter-State Council to inquire into and advise upon disputes and subjects of common interest between States and the Union.
10. Article 324: Vests superintendence, direction and control of elections in the Election Commission of India.

Government Initiatives

1. National e-Vidhan Application (NeVA): A digital platform under the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs that puts legislature business, questions, bills and committee papers online for members and citizens.
2. Digital Sansad: A portal and application carrying live proceedings, member profiles, debates and legislative documents of both Houses.
3. Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy, 2014: Requires ministries to place draft legislation and its financial and environmental implications in the public domain for at least thirty days before introduction.
4. Members of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme (MPLADS): Provides each member an annual allocation for local development works, with expenditure reported through a dedicated monitoring portal.
5. Parliamentary Research and Information Support to Members (PRISM): A research service of the Lok Sabha Secretariat that supplies members with briefs and background material on legislative subjects.

Key Facts about Parliament and its Committees

1. Committee count: There are 24 Department-related Standing Committees, 16 serviced by the Lok Sabha Secretariat and 8 by the Rajya Sabha Secretariat.
2. Composition: Each Department-related Standing Committee has 31 members, 21 from the Lok Sabha and 10 from the Rajya Sabha, with a one-year term.
3. Introduction year: The Department-related Standing Committee system was introduced in 1993.
4. Public Accounts Committee: The oldest financial committee, set up in 1921, with 22 members and, by convention since 1967, chaired by a member of the Opposition.
5. Estimates Committee: The largest financial committee, with 30 members drawn only from the Lok Sabha.
6. Ministerial exclusion: A Minister cannot be a member of any Department-related Standing Committee or financial committee.
7. National Constitution Day: Observed on 26 November, marking the adoption of the Constitution in 1949.

Back2Basics: Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committees

1. What they are: Permanent committees of Parliament attached to groups of ministries, which examine that ministry’s legislation, budget and functioning through the year.
2. Origin: Instituted in 1993 on the recommendation of the Rules Committee of the Lok Sabha, expanded to the present 24 committees in 2004.
3. Membership and term: 31 members each, 21 from the Lok Sabha nominated by the Speaker and 10 from the Rajya Sabha nominated by the Chairman, for a term of one year.
4. Mandate: Consider Demands for Grants of the concerned ministries, examine bills referred to them, consider annual reports, and examine long-term national basic policy documents laid before the House.
5. Limits on mandate: They do not consider matters of day-to-day administration and do not usually consider matters already under consideration by another parliamentary committee.
6. Status of reports: Their reports are recommendatory and persuasive in value, and the government is not bound to accept them.
7. Working method: They meet in private, which allows members to question officials without the pressure of party positions taken in public debate.

Challenges in Parliamentary Accountability

1. Falling sitting days: The number of days Parliament actually sits has declined steadily, compressing the time available for scrutiny of every bill and demand. Eg. The first Lok Sabha averaged around 135 sittings a year, against roughly 55 sittings a year in recent Lok Sabhas.
2. The guillotine on Demands for Grants: Most ministry demands are put to vote without discussion once the allotted days expire, so departmental spending passes unexamined. Eg. Between 2019 and 2023 around 80 per cent of the Union Budget was guillotined each year.
3. The ordinance route: Legislating by ordinance under Article 123 shifts law-making to the executive and presents the House with a fait accompli. Eg. The three farm laws of 2020 were first promulgated as ordinances in June 2020 before being introduced as bills in the Monsoon Session.
4. Thin committee attendance: Standing Committee scrutiny weakens when members do not attend, since quorum failures postpone the examination of ministry demands. Eg. Average attendance in Department-related Standing Committees has hovered around half the membership across recent Lok Sabhas.
5. Curtailment of Question Hour: Question Hour is the direct instrument of ministerial answerability and it is among the first casualties of a compressed session. Eg. Question Hour was dropped entirely from the Monsoon Session of 2020.
6. Opacity in political funding: Weak disclosure prevents Parliament and the public from tracing who funds the parties that legislate. Eg. Section 29C of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 requires disclosure only of donations above Rs 20,000, and a large share of party income continues to be reported from unknown sources.

Way Forward

1. Fill the Deputy Speaker’s office: Elect a Deputy Speaker at the start of every Lok Sabha, by convention from the Opposition, so an impartial presiding officer exists whenever the Speaker cannot preside.
2. Fix a minimum calendar: Prescribe a statutory minimum number of sitting days for each House, with the power to convene vested beyond the executive alone.
3. Mandatory committee referral: Make referral of every bill to a Department-related Standing Committee the default, with a recorded reason required for any exception.
4. A floor vote for mass suspensions: Adopt the Second Administrative Reforms Commission recommendation that suspensions above a threshold require a vote of the House rather than a declaration from the Chair.
5. Broaden appointment panels: Restore a non-executive presence in the selection committee for election commissioners, in line with the direction in Anoop Baranwal versus Union of India (2023), so appointments to constitutional bodies command cross-party credibility.
6. Enforce pre-legislative consultation: Make the thirty-day public comment requirement of the Pre-Legislative Consultation Policy binding, with the ministry’s response to comments laid before the House alongside the bill.
7. Revive federal consultative forums: Convene the Inter-State Council at fixed intervals and route major decisions affecting States through it before notification.

“[2021, GS2, 15] Do Department-related Parliamentary Standing Committees keep the administration on its toes and inspire reverence for parliamentary control? Evaluate the working of such committees with suitable examples.”