India inaugurated a new Parliament building last Sunday. The triangular complex stands beside the old circular Parliament House constructed during British rule and will eventually become the principal physical home of the world’s largest representative democracy. It contains substantially greater seating capacity, modernised facilities and room for a future expansion in the number of MPs. The project can therefore be defended in practical terms: India’s population has expanded enormously, its existing parliamentary infrastructure is nearly a century old, and a country of more than 1.4 billion people will eventually require institutions capable of representing that scale. Yet the inauguration itself became politically contentious because Prime Minister Narendra Modi, rather than President Droupadi Murmu, formally opened the building, prompting most major opposition parties to boycott the ceremony.
The constitutional dispute is narrower than some of the rhetoric surrounding it. The president is India’s head of state, while executive political authority is exercised principally through the prime minister and Council of Ministers responsible to Parliament. The Constitution does not provide a simple rule stating who must inaugurate a new parliamentary building. The opposition’s objection is therefore primarily about institutional symbolism rather than an obvious constitutional violation. That does not make it meaningless. Symbols are part of how political systems communicate who possesses authority and whether institutions belong to temporary governments or to the state itself.
A parliament is particularly sensitive to that distinction because it is not supposed to belong to the government. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party currently possesses a large Lok Sabha majority and therefore controls the executive, but Parliament also contains opposition parties whose constitutional purpose is to challenge that executive. The building houses the government and the people attempting to remove it. Treating its inauguration primarily as an achievement of the governing leader can therefore create the impression, fairly or unfairly, that an institution belonging to the entire representative system has become part of one government’s political narrative.
This is where the role of a ceremonial head of state becomes easier to understand. Presidents and constitutional monarchs often possess limited direct political power precisely because their symbolic authority is supposed to stand somewhat outside ordinary partisan competition. Having such a figure perform certain national ceremonies can communicate institutional continuity: governments change, elections change parliamentary majorities and prime ministers eventually leave, while the state persists. The symbolism works only imperfectly, but the underlying purpose is separating the office from the occupant and the state from the government.
That distinction has become increasingly important throughout these posts. Bolsonaro controlled Brazil’s presidency but did not own the Brazilian state. Castillo was elected president of Peru but could not dissolve institutions simply because they constrained him. Erdoğan can win Turkish elections without Turkey becoming synonymous with Erdoğan. The same principle should apply to Modi. His electoral victories give him extensive authority to govern India. They do not make institutions such as Parliament achievements belonging exclusively to him or his party.
The government’s perspective also deserves more than dismissal. Modi has placed enormous emphasis on replacing or reinterpreting symbols associated with British colonial rule, and the new Parliament forms part of a broader attempt to construct a political architecture presented as more distinctly Indian. The old Parliament House was designed by British architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker as part of imperial New Delhi. Building a new legislative complex can therefore be framed as a post-colonial state creating institutions that reflect its own political identity rather than continuing indefinitely inside buildings constructed for imperial government.
There is genuine significance in that argument. Physical spaces influence how states understand themselves, and former colonies are entitled to reconsider inherited symbols. Independence does not require preserving every institution, name or monument produced under foreign rule simply because it has become familiar. Yet decolonisation and partisan political ownership are different projects. Replacing a colonial symbol is most powerful when the replacement feels like an institution belonging broadly to the post-colonial republic rather than a monument to whichever government happened to commission it.
The debate around the Sengol, a ceremonial sceptre installed near the Speaker’s chair during the inauguration, demonstrates this difficulty. The government presented it as connected to India’s transfer of power in 1947 and as a symbol of indigenous political tradition. Critics challenged parts of the historical narrative surrounding its role in independence and questioned whether a religiously inflected symbol should occupy such prominence in the legislature of a constitutionally secular republic. The argument therefore became another contest over how modern India should interpret its pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial past.
This is why symbolic politics should not automatically be dismissed as a distraction from “real” economic issues. Political communities need stories explaining where institutions came from and what they represent. Flags, parliamentary rituals, constitutions, monuments and national ceremonies help produce those stories. The danger begins when history becomes a resource governments can edit too easily for contemporary political purposes. Historical claims deserve the same evidentiary standards whether they support or challenge the government.
The more important question, however, is what happens inside the new Parliament once the ceremonies end. A legislature can possess magnificent architecture while becoming politically weak. Conversely, a parliament operating inside an unattractive building can exercise powerful scrutiny over government. Institutional quality is determined by procedures, information and political incentives rather than marble, carpets or seating capacity. The building can improve the infrastructure of representation without automatically improving representation itself.
Parliament’s central democratic function is not merely passing legislation. Governments with stable majorities can often pass legislation relatively easily. Parliament is also supposed to expose executive decisions to scrutiny, provide opposition parties with information, allow committees to investigate policy and force ministers to explain their actions publicly. These functions are less visible than voting on bills but may be more important for preventing excessive concentration of power.
This is why the amount and quality of parliamentary deliberation matters. A government elected with a majority has a legitimate right to implement its programme, but majority rule does not require treating legislative scrutiny as an inconvenience. If Parliament becomes primarily a mechanism for ratifying decisions already taken by the executive, the physical legislature remains while part of its constitutional purpose weakens.
The same problem exists in many parliamentary democracies because executives normally control legislative majorities. Britain’s government usually commands the House of Commons through party discipline. India’s government similarly relies on its parliamentary majority. The separation of powers is therefore less institutional than in presidential systems such as the United States, where the legislature and executive are elected separately. This makes internal parliamentary constraints particularly important: committees, opposition rights, debate, questions, procedural rules and access to information.
India’s scale makes the representative question even more consequential. The current Lok Sabha has 543 elected seats, a number effectively frozen for decades while India’s population has more than doubled. The new chamber has substantially more physical capacity, which immediately raises the possibility of a future expansion of parliamentary representation. That will eventually force India to confront a politically difficult question: how should seats be distributed between states whose populations have grown at dramatically different rates?
This connects directly to the demographic argument from April. Southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu reduced fertility earlier and now have slower population growth than several northern states. If parliamentary seats are redistributed strictly according to current population, faster-growing states could gain substantial representation while states that successfully implemented population-control and development policies lose relative political weight. A principle that appears democratically obvious, equal representation according to population, can therefore produce a distribution that some states interpret as punishment for demographic success.
The alternative is also difficult. Permanently preserving existing representation would mean citizens in faster-growing states eventually receive fewer MPs per person than citizens elsewhere. That violates another conception of political equality. India will therefore have to balance equality between individuals against stability between states, just as other federations balance population-based representation with territorial representation through institutional design.
This is not an architectural problem, but the larger chamber makes the future constitutional problem physically visible. India is becoming too populous and politically complex for representation to remain frozen indefinitely. The eventual delimitation debate could become one of the most important federal questions in Indian politics because representation determines not merely how many MPs a state receives but how much influence it possesses over national governments, budgets and legislation.
A larger Parliament could improve representation if it reduces the enormous number of citizens represented by each MP. India’s constituencies are exceptionally large by international democratic standards. More representatives could theoretically create closer links between voters and legislators, improve constituency service and allow greater diversity of political representation. Yet simply increasing the number of MPs will not improve democracy if party leadership continues determining most parliamentary behaviour from above.
This is the difference between descriptive capacity and substantive capacity. A chamber can contain more representatives without those representatives becoming more independently influential. Institutional reform therefore needs to consider not only how many MPs sit in Parliament but what information, committee resources and procedural powers they possess once there.
The opposition boycott should be evaluated through the same institutional lens. Opposition parties had a legitimate symbolic objection and were entitled to refuse participation. Yet boycotts have costs because an opposition’s constitutional function is usually strongest when it occupies institutional spaces rather than abandons them. Repeatedly withdrawing from Parliament or ceremonies can allow the government to dominate precisely the institutions the opposition argues should remain plural.
This creates a strategic dilemma. Participation can appear to legitimise a process the opposition considers improper. Non-participation removes the opposition’s voice from the process altogether. The correct choice depends on circumstances, but opposition parties should recognise that institutional presence is itself a form of power. Democracies need governments willing to tolerate opposition and opposition parties willing to use the institutions available to them rather than treating politics only as mobilisation outside them.
The controversy therefore contains responsibilities on both sides. The government should avoid treating its electoral majority as ownership of national institutions. The opposition should avoid allowing disagreement with the government to become disengagement from those institutions. Parliament works only when political rivals continue accepting that the same building belongs to all of them.
This may be the most useful way to understand the new complex. Architecture cannot create parliamentary democracy, but architecture can communicate what a political system believes about itself. A legislature designed for hundreds of additional representatives acknowledges that Indian democracy will continue expanding and changing. A building incorporating Indian artistic and historical traditions can symbolise political independence from colonial rule. Neither achievement guarantees that the politics practised inside will remain pluralistic.
That will depend on behaviour. Does the government answer difficult questions? Are committees capable of serious scrutiny? Can opposition MPs speak and organise effectively? Are major bills debated sufficiently? Does Parliament remain a place where executive authority is challenged rather than merely displayed? Those questions determine institutional quality far more than who held the ceremonial object during the inauguration.
The controversy over President Murmu’s absence from the inauguration is therefore significant mainly because it points towards a larger principle. Democratic institutions need to remain conceptually separate from the politicians temporarily controlling them. Governments naturally want credit for constructing buildings, passing laws and implementing projects. Political competition gives them every incentive to turn public achievements into partisan achievements.
Constitutional culture provides the counterweight. It reminds governments that the institutions they build with public authority and public money eventually belong to their opponents too. One day another party may occupy the treasury benches, another prime minister will enter the building and another majority will control the agenda. The legitimacy of Parliament depends on citizens believing that transition would not transform the building from “our Parliament” into “their Parliament”.
That is why symbols matter, but also why they are insufficient. A president inaugurating the building would not automatically make Indian democracy healthier. A prime minister inaugurating it does not automatically make India less democratic. The more consequential issue is whether the political culture surrounding Parliament preserves the distinction between winning the state and owning the state.
India has constructed an impressive new physical home for its legislature. The building will probably remain long after the current government, opposition and controversies surrounding its inauguration have disappeared. That longevity should determine how politicians think about it.
Governments are temporary.
Parliament is supposed to outlast them.
