AS the budget session of India’s parliament opens this month, one views the course of its proceedings with not a little anxiety. At stake is much more than the passage of the Money Bill following the presentation of the budget. It is the health of India’s parliamentary system and, at one remove, of its democracy itself. Two whole sessions were all but washed away last year.

In this, as on foreign policy, the president of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi emulated the bad example set by the BJP when it was in the opposition. The BJP set this precedent a decade ago. Its leader Atal Behari Vajpayee said in the Lok Sabha in December 1995. “We don’t want a debate for debate’s sake”.

The implication is plain. Since debates do not yield the result desired by the opposition, it will prevent parliament from functioning. There is a certain contempt for debates, as if they were an exercise in futility.

However, a parliamentary debate has a direct impact on the minds of the public. Vigorous debate in parliament can well be complemented by mass meetings outside, by protest marches and demonstrations.

Deadlock in parliament reflects a deadlock in the political system.

What Ivor Jennings wrote in Cabinet Government is pertinent: “The function of parliament is not to govern but to criticise. Its criticism, too, is directed not so much towards a fundamental modification of the government’s policy as towards the education of public opinion … the government governs and the opposition criticises.

“Failure to understand this simple principle is one of the causes of the failure of so many of the progeny of mother of parliaments and of the supersession of parliamentary government by dictatorship.”

Matters would not have taken such a turn if there was not a breakdown of trust and communications between the government in power and the party in opposition.

In Britain, there is a firmly established tradition of settling important topics in the business of the House of Commons “behind the speaker’s chair”.

The government provides the opposition leader in strict confidence with an advance copy of the text of any major policy pronouncement on domestic or foreign affairs. That gives him time to consult close colleagues on the response he should give in the House of Commons. This injects a sense of responsibility in both sides.

The chief whip approaches his counterpart in the opposition to facilitate debate and settle issues on the allocation of time. Time to debate a subject of national concern is seldom refused. “The opposition is not just a nuisance to be tolerated, but a definite and essential part of the Constitution.”

Deadlock in parliament reflects a deadlock in the political system itself. Over a decade ago, the speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich created precisely such a deadlock forcing the closure for a couple of days or so of some US embassies and consulates.

This was a reflection of the deep divide between the Republicans and the Democrats ever since arch conservatives led by president Ronald Reagan came to power in 1981. President Barack Obama has faced similar problems.

India has been through a similar experience ever since Indira Gandhi split the Congress in 1969 and made a bid for total power. It was left to the BJP to inject the ideological factor, Hindutva, in 1990. The ideological battle acquired intensity once a lifelong RSS pracharak (activist) became prime minister in May 2014.

Pragmatic differences can be resolved. But not an ideological divide which brooks no compromise.

A change of government after an election becomes “a revolution disguised under a constitutional procedure”. The losers refuse to accept defeat and the cycle repeats itself. It has been called “the decline of politics” and its remedy is nothing short of the political parties accepting the responsibility they owe to the nation and conducting a legitimate political contest in a democracy with a strict respect for the rules of the system.

All this should prod serious reflection in the admirers of the presidential system. In a parliamentary system, a deadlock makes governance difficult. But in a presidential system it makes governance impossible.

In the final analysis, as Judge Learned Hand said: “A society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish.

“What is the spirit of moderation? It is the temper which does not press a partisan advantage to its bitter end, which can understand and will respect the other side.”

The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2016