For Indians still young enough to believe that the parliament is bound by the constitution to hold the government responsible for its sins of commission and omission, the debate on Commonwealth Games in Lok Sabha on Monday might have felt profoundly unsettling.

On the face of it, a parliamentary debate on anything of public concern and public interest is reassuring; it gives you a pleasant feeling that the government of this country is ultimately answerable to us citizens through our elected representatives.
But then one inevitably realizes that parliamentary debates, even when their quality meets our expectations, never seem to have any effect on how the government conducts itself.

The ministers now seem increasingly careless and contemptuous of the opinion expressed in a parliamentary debate even though they affect owlishly serious miens for the benefit of the television cameras and journalists. They must look and sound as if they have nothing but public interest in mind even when they have been caught red-handed acting against public interest.

The non-ministerial members of the government take care not to be off-message even in parliamentary debates. (Like Suresh Kalmadi on Monday, they also remain silent and bide their time.) Most of them actually address their party whips and the high command when they look to be addressing the Speaker or other members. They know they will be ignored (or browbeaten) by the treasury bench when they do summon up the courage to go by their conscience rather than by the party line.

The members of the opposition similarly go by the broad agreements and niceties of the amoral and/or immoral politics of the day in raising matters and putting forward their arguments. They too have little choice but to go by their party whips and party lines.
The parliamentary debates, consequently, are neither honest nor introspective and comprehensive in their coverage of issues.

What you usually have is a debate like the one on Commonwealth Games on Monday: ritualistic, inadequately honest and unresolved. The opposition parties expressed their criticism, much of it fairly plausible, and the ruling coalition warded it off, with no intention on either side to come to a consensus on what went wrong, when, where, how it could have been avoided, and what needs to be done now. The citizens are left with no confidence that the debate on Monday will have any effect on the conduct of the government in future.

The debate itself raised some fundamental questions: Shouldn’t the parliament have debated Commonwealth Games even before they were bid for? What was the parliament doing then? Why should the decision on organizing a multi-year, publicly-funded, publicly-executed and monstrously expensive international sports show be even considered outside the national parliament and allowed to be presented by the executive stealthily to the citizens like a fait accompli?

These questions must trouble the opposition as well as the treasury bench. Meanwhile, the citizens of India are doomed to live in insecurity. It’s because they increasingly realize that the parliament is fast losing the plot.