When Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla adjourned this year’s Monsoon Session sine die, he skipped the customary valedictory on the performance of the House during the session. The parliament passed 12 bills over 19 sittings, of which 11 were passed without a single word on their content. The Lok Sabha ran for less than a fifth of the time allotted to it. Not one of the 12 bills passed by the Lok Sabha this session underwent the scrutiny of a parliamentary standing committee.Union Minister Kiren Rijiju called this session a legislative success as 12 Bills were passed, while Congress MP Jairam Ramesh called it a ‘complete washout’. To ascertain the veracity of these claims, we need to ask ourselves two questions. What are the conditions that determine the success of a parliamentary session? And how do we decide that the parliament has fulfilled its duty of law making? The answer definitely does not lie in the quantity of Bills passed, as Rijiju’s statement seems to imply.A rich history of legislative debatesIn 2021, the then Chief Justice of India (CJI), N.V. Ramanna expressed his concern regarding the lack of debates in the Indian parliament. According to him, this increased the burden of the judiciary as they are unable to discern legislative intent while interpreting a statutory provision. It is a well known rule of legal interpretation, that in case of ambiguity in legal text, legislative debates may be relied upon to determine the intent of the statute. V.R. Krishna Iyer, former judge of the Supreme Court had remarked in a judgment that “the ‘sound-proof theory’ of ignoring voices from parliamentary debates, once sanctified by British tradition, has been replaced by the more legally realistic and socially responsible canon of listening to the legislative authors when their artifact is being interpreted”. Similarly, the reports of the parliamentary standing committee can also be relied on for legislative interpretation, as held by a five judge bench in Kalpana Mehta v. Union of India [(2018) 7 SCC 1]. This does not mean that the courts are prevented from going beyond the legislative intent. However, the lack of debates, does deprive the court of an important aid for interpretation.This is just one of the consequences of ‘no-discussion’. India has a rich history of legislative debates. The famous debate between Jawahar Lal Nehru and Ram Manohar Lohia on the income of an average Indian, or the legislative debates on the Hindu Code Bill are examples of how a parliament should conduct itself. When the Hindu Code Bill was introduced in 1947, it was sent to a select committee, and then debated, clause by clause – over the period of 1948-1949. Dr B.R. Ambedkar, as the then law minister, defended every single clause of the bill, arguing against ministers of the government he was a part of, the conservatives in the parliament and the then President of India himself. When the Congress government allowed the Bill to lapse, Ambedkar resigned in protest, because among other reasons, he believed that adequate time was not given to discussion of this Bill. Can any minister make such a political statement against the lack of deliberation in legislatures today?In recent times, the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill, 2014 (GST) saw almost two years of shepherding between the Houses, a select committee in the Rajya Sabha in 2015 and several hours of debate before it was passed unanimously in the Lok Sabha in August 2016 by a government that did not have a majority in the Rajya Sabha. It is this kind of consensus building that makes for good legislation, and that builds democratic culture. Unfortunately, the recent parliamentary sessions do not reflect this ethos. Since 1955, Lok Sabha sittings have declined.Democratic backslidingThe last parliamentary session is a hallmark example of democratic backsliding. According to ‘time spent data’ collated by the Public Policy Research Foundation, seven of the 12 bills combined got a mere 28 minutes of discussion in the Lok Sabha. Three of those minutes were on the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development (Amendment) Bill, 2021 – a bill that creates a digital registry for MSMEs, changes the law on disputes over delayed payments to MSMEs, and that substitutes some crimes with graded penalties. All these are of direct relevance to almost every businessman and MSME creditor in the country. The Supreme Court (Number of Judges) Amendment Bill, 2021, which raised the sanctioned strength of the Supreme Court to 37 to tackle case backlogs, saw four minutes of discussion. The Bankers’ Books Evidence Bill, 2021 – which updates banking law to include electronic and cloud evidence – was discussed for five minutes. The Kerala (Alteration of Name) Bill, 2026, which proposed a change in the state’s official name in the Constitution from Kerala to Keralam, got four minutes. The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2021 was passed in another five minutes. This Bill gives the Union government the power to auction mines in states, impacting their fiscal autonomy. It also prefers resource exploitation over sustainable development. However, the parliament didn’t consider these issues worthy of deliberations.The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Amendment Bill – which seeks to tighten regulations around foreign contributions to NGOs and civil society – got no debate, but was sent to a Joint Committee, the only such instance this session. The only bill that got extensive discussion (10 hours) was the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Amendment Bill, which creates fast track courts and enhances penalties. This, after widespread youth protests accountability for paper leaks.Two bills passed this session merely replaced ordinances promulgated by the government of India at the beginning of the financial year – on income tax and on the strength of the Supreme court – meaning that parliament was merely rubber stamping executive decision. As the Public Policy Research Foundation has noted, committees have seen a decline in the number of cases sent to them – 60% of Bills introduced in 2004-2009 were sent for committee consideration. In 2014-19, it was 25%, and 12% in the current Lok Sabha. This year, this number is a glaring ‘zero’. An analysis of this data shows that the law making function has been delegated to the executive. The parliament is gradually becoming a space to engage in rhetoric, while laws impacting crores of Indians are enacted in a mindless manner. This phenomenon also compromises the constitutional requirement of executive accountability to the parliament.A harmful parliamentary culture taking shapeWhat we intend to highlight is that it is the constitutional duty of the parliamentarians to discuss and debate these laws, a responsibility that they are elected to perform. Robust discussion evokes confidence in the citizens that the laws have been properly scrutinised, and that their concerns have been presented before the legislature by their elected representative.It’s unfortunate that today, a legislative session’s success is determined by the number of Bills passed, even if there was no deliberation on what those Bills mean for the nation. This new parliamentary culture is one of the examples of ‘executive aggrandizement’, a phenomenon where the system of checks and balances on the political executive in a constitutional democracy is intentionally dismantled, often by complying with the procedure but by completely missing the purpose or spirit behind a procedural requirement. Another example of this is an increase in instances of the government passing substantive non-financial Bills as money bills, in order to bypass the Rajya Sabha, where it does not command majority.Rijiju, in his overview of the current Monsoon Session, seems to have suggested that the walkouts by the opposition reduced the available parliamentary time, and hence the lack of discussion. While this may be factually true, it does not mean that the opposition becomes fully responsible for the lack of deliberation.Walkouts have punctuated sessions of all Lok Sabhas since 1952. Rijiju’s argument assumes that debate requires all members to be present. The Presiding Officer can also decide to send (or not send) a bill to a parliamentary committee in advance of any walkouts. There was not a single committee reference this session. Even the MMDR Amendment Act, 2026, a law that substantially impacts fiscal federalism, was not referred to any committee and was passed without any discussion. Thus, to assign the blame for not deliberating on the Bill solely to the opposition is a hogwash.This pattern raises serious concerns about our democratic institutions. Why is there no public outrage when a parliament passes 12 laws in three and a half weeks? The citizens’ attention has been sufficiently occupied by issues that appear inane in front of this collapse of democratic ethos. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself. It arrives insidiously, quietly shifting the baseline of accountability, until a time comes when we find that no accountability exists at all. But as citizens, we must demand accountability and loudly resist even the smallest act that subverts the democratic and constitutional ideals.Naina Bhargava is a practicing Advocate in the Supreme Court of India. Anumeha Mishra is an Assistant Professor at the Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi.