The debate on the Motion of Thanks on the President’s Address in parliament that took place on February 4 and 5, showcased the seemingly unbridgeable chasm that exists between the ruling party and the opposition in the country. The former is driven by a mixture of the arrogance of power; the impunity that comes from such arrogance; and the determination to never cede even an iota of space to the arguments of political rivals; the latter seethes with the frustration of having the whole weight of the system of political domination brought to bear on them, along with the twisting of every rule and norm in ways to disadvantage them and render them voiceless – quite literally so.

It was never meant to be like this. Parliament, as envisaged by the founders of the nation, was to be an arena for free speech and the healthy exchange of views. In fact, the draft constitution of India submitted to the president of the Constituent Assembly almost exactly 88 years ago, specified that “subject to the rules and standing orders regulating the procedure of parliament, there shall be freedom of speech in parliament”.

The evidence from two days of listening to our parliamentarians respond to the President’s Address indicates how far the present parliament has drifted from that foundational idea. The ruling party’s appetite for censoring speech, so blatantly manifest outside parliament – whether in universities, at protest sites, on online news portals and even during literary festivals as the de-platforming of Anand Teltumbde at the Kala Goda festival would indicate – has now found its way into the very seat of parliamentary democracy. 

The censorship works in several ways and at multiple levels. Notice, for instance, the silencing of leader of opposition (LoP) Rahul Gandhi on the floor of the Lok Sabha as he was replying to the Motion of Thanks to the president’s speech, and sought to speak on the contents of former army chief. M.M. Naravane’s memoir, Four Stars of Destiny. The memoir was published by Penguin in April 2024, but has yet to appear on Indian bookshelves nearly two years later.

The reason for its animated suspension is supposedly because it has not got clearance from the defence establishment; which in turn may have something to do with the nature of its contents. According to Sushant Singh, writing on the memoir in The Caravan, the book “raises unsettling questions about how little Indians know about the Ladakh crisis” and the Galwan clash of 2020, in which the lives of at least 20 Indian soldiers were lost. Among the aspects the Indian public are not sufficiently aware of is, what Sushant describes, as “the troubling absence of political accountability at a moment when the country stood on the brink of war”, something that comes through clearly in Naravane’s account.

The extraordinary activity that we saw in parliament among Treasury benches recently was driven precisely because of the import of these revelations. In their anxiety to shield a government that has always claimed strong nationalist credentials from accusations of failing to protect India from incursions by the Chinese military, MP after MP of the ruling party leapt to their feet to shout down the LoP.

Among the first off the block was the Union defence minister Rajnath Singh. He wanted to know if the book had been published: “If it has been published, then he can quote from the book. But if the book has not been published then there is no justification.” Too clever half, this statement, because after all, it was his ministry that was sitting tight on releasing it for publication! 

Union home minister Amit Shah, was also clearly agitated, citing chapter and verse to establish that Gandhi needed to be silenced. What possibly lent an even keener edge to their anxieties was the fact that it was the prime minister himself who had claimed in June 2020, after news of 20 casualties of the Indian army came in, that all was well, that “neither is anyone inside our territory nor is any of our posts captured” (‘Galwan Valley: India PM Modi says military will keep borders secure,’ June 20, BBC). Additionally, as Sushant points out in The Caravan piece, “The real value of Naravane’s memoir lies elsewhere:........

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