By Kumkum Chadha
If Congress MP Renuka Chowdhury brought a dog to Parliament, a BJP member decried the absence of “proper documentation”. It is difficult to measure the level of absurdity or judge who came out worse, but one thing is clear: Parliament and those who are elected to it, have touched a new low.
To put this in context, one must begin with the dog-story as it has panned out.
Hell broke loose when Chowdhury’s car drove into Parliament with a dog. According to Chowdhury, she had picked up a stray and was taking it to a veterinarian. One story is that her driver was supposed to drop her off to Parliament and then take the dog to the vet. Another story is that she had rescued a stray on way to Parliament and was taking it to the vet. There is yet another story about the dog in the car being Chowdhury’s own pet and was driven to Parliament for pure theatrics.
And theatrics did follow. When the ruling party accused Chowdhury of drama, she said that the government “does not like animals”. Not the one to stop there, she said: “What is their problem? It is so small, does it look like it will bite? Those sitting inside Parliament bite, not dogs,” she said, adding that there is no law against rescuing a street dog: “Waah Sarkar” she tweeted.
In fact, when she was threatened with a Privilege Motion, she imitated a bark: “bhau, bhau” is what she told mediapersons.
Not the one to let go, the BJP said that Chowdhury was making a joke of Parliament and doing “tamasha” even as it demanded action against the “errant” MP.
A BJP member reportedly went as far as saying that members cannot bring anyone inside Parliament without “proper documents”. At this point, it is difficult to judge where Chowdhury had erred: was it about letting in a dog in Parliament or was it about driving in one without documents?
While the debate rages, this is not the first time that Chowdhury has locked horns.
Rewind to 2018. It was none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi who mocked Chowdhury’s loud laughter in Parliament. In the Rajya Sabha, Chowdhury had laughed aloud at one of Modi’s remarks which led to the Chair asking for restraint. At this, the prime minister said that she should not be stopped: “After the Ramayan serial, we got the privilege of hearing this kind of laughter only today.”
Even though the prime minister did not name the Ramayan character, it was clear that the reference was to Ravana’s sister Surpanakha, a demoness who had a contagious laughter. The BJP worsened the situation by saying that such laughter could scare children. Union Minister Kiren Rijiju went a step further as he shared a video clip from a Ramayan TV serial episode in which Surpanakha was seen laughing hysterically.
But then Chowdhury is not a damsel in distress. She too has indulged in name calling. Rewind to Akali Dal’s Harsimrat Kaur Badal, then Union minister. Some years ago, Chowdhury is alleged to have called her a trash, kachra. She also asked her to go to hell, “bhaad me jaye”, to use Chowdhury’s exact quote dismissing Badal’s rant as “political drama”.
While on drama, the word was liberally used both by the BJP and the Congress.
For starters, in his customary pre-session address this winter, the prime minister said: “There are plenty of places to perform drama. Those who want to do drama, let them do it elsewhere. Here, there should be delivery, not drama.” he had said.
Hitting back at Modi, Congress President and Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge said the prime minister, instead of addressing key issues before Parliament, had once again “delivered dramebaazi”. The reality, he said, was that the government has been continuously “trampling upon Parliamentary decorum and Parliamentary system for the past 11 years”. “The BJP should now end this drama of distraction, and engage in debate in Parliament on real issues facing the people,” Kharge said.
Be it a dog, a Surpanakha-comment or kachra-remark, the underlying fact is that the decorum and dignity of Parliament has been lowered, rather damaged irreparably. And one cannot lay the blame on any one party or an MP except to say that it is a collective failure.
What can one say about MPs mocking the Chair outside the House? Or wearing a T-shirt and also night-pyjamas during a midnight session?
The context: Last year, Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee had imitated and mocked Jagdeep Dhankhar, then vice-president, and his mannerisms. The offensive video that went viral was in bad taste. But there was no remorse on Banerjee’s part. Instead, he said that he would keep doing the mimicry “a thousand times” as it is an “art form”.
As for the T-shirt, it has become Rahul Gandhi’s signature dress. He wears it to Parliament in contravention of a norm of being formally and properly dressed. One may argue that Parliament does not have a dress code and therefore one can “stroll in” in a T-shirt which is exactly what Gandhi does day in and day out. Worse still, he once walked in, in night-pyjamas to Parliament. It was in April this year that Rahul returned to Parliament late at night to vote on the Waqf Amendment Bill. He was reportedly wearing flip-flops and night-pyjamas implying that he had reached Parliament “straight out of bed”. Irrespective, the Gandhi scion has given a complete go-by to the dress code in Parliament which does not speak well for a leader positioning himself as the next prime minister.
Equally it is unprecedented to hear leader-specific slogans inside the House. Decode this and one finds that under the BJP rule whenever the prime minister walks into the Lok Sabha chants of “Modi, Modi” pierce the walls. Surprisingly, there is no direction or intervention by the Chair to stop this. As things appear, if the Chair could, it too would join the pro-Modi sloganeering.
On substantive issues, both the ruling party and the Opposition have made a mockery of the institution that was revered in the past. It was a constitutional sanctum sanctorum, one where issues were meant to be discussed, debated and even differed with. Today, it is reduced to a ruckus followed by adjournments. Quite often an entire session is wiped out simply because Opposition MPs are hell-bent on not allowing the House to function. In fact, things have come to such a pass that unlike in the past when it was a given that Parliament would function, now a smooth-run is a pipe-dream.
Statistics substantiate this amply. For instance, during the Monsoon Session of Parliament held between July 21 and August 21, 2025, two-thirds of the planned time was lost to disruptions. This affected Question Hour wherein Lok Sabha worked for 23 percent while Rajya Sabha worked for six percent of the scheduled time. Several Bills were also passed without discussion amidst the disruption.
The silver lining was the Budget session that saw unusually high productivity—111 percent in the Lok Sabha and 112 percent in the Rajya Sabha—with Question Hour functioning better as well. The Budget Session of 2024 had shown similar numbers, but these are exceptions to the rule of unruliness that has become the hallmark in recent years.
That there is institutional erosion is a given. But would it be fair to blame the Opposition alone? While it is for the Opposition to raise and push issues that they can corner the government on, it also remains the government’s responsibility to ensure that Parliament functions. The decline in productivity is a structural and cross-government problem. And it is not the BJP’s alone.
There are ample instances in the past: during the UPA-II, the 15th Lok Sabha performed the worst. Over 40 percent of the scheduled time was lost as against the productivity of the 13th and 14th Lok Sabhas which had a much higher productivity at 91 percent and 87 percent, respectively.
The costs for running Parliament are phenomenal: Rs 2.5 lakh per minute which averages Rs six crore per day and Rs 600 crore per year according to rough estimates.
So, who pays for all this? And shouldn’t MPs who are elected to raise issues of public interest be made accountable? Shouldn’t they be penalized and held accountable for wasted man-hours?
An example was set by BJP’s Baijayant Jay Panda who said a decade ago that he would return his salary “proportional to time wasted/lost” during the Winter Session which was the least productive among 10 sessions since 2014.
A sane and necessary step: for every man hour lost in disruptions, the MPs must pay a penalty: in other words: a cut in the salary of every MP proportional to the man-hours that have been lost. Once the shoe pinches, they will learn to walk properly: in other words, a salary deduction would mean restoration of working hours.
—The writer is an author, journalist and political commentator
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