Siddharth Kumar

Being a Member of Parliament entails immense responsibility, a responsibility that far too few MPs appear to take seriously. Parliament is a place where, on average, each MP represents nearly 25 lakh voters. Yet the average number of days Parliament sits in session each year has declined from around 120 in 1952 to just 62 in 2025. This means that among the 545 MPs, some never get an opportunity to speak, some are not allotted time by their parties, some are prevented from speaking by the Speaker, and some choose not to speak at all because they have little of substance to contribute and merely serve as headcount to demonstrate their party’s numerical strength in the House.

Every minute in Parliament is precious. The expectation is that parties and MPs will use this limited time to discuss matters of public importance, address structural issues affecting society, and enact laws with real consequences for citizens.

When politicians like Raghav Chadha use this important and limited parliamentary time to raise issues such as the cost of samosas at airports, making AI tools free for youth, or telecom billing cycles, while conveniently ignoring why airports have been leased to a specific business tycoon perceived to be close to the ruling party, or how the Indian telecom sector evolved into a cartelised duopoly, it trivialises the underlying issues and distracts public attention from what are ostensibly the real concerns affecting ordinary citizens.

Cheap samosa theatrics are not merely an episode of social media absurdity. They are symptomatic of a deeper crisis in Indian public discourse: the systematic trivialisation of substantive political issues and the growing inability of the middle class to engage with structural questions.

India today faces enormous challenges, including unemployment, agrarian distress, rising inequality, stagnant wages, crumbling public services, environmental degradation, and increasing economic precarity in urban life. Yet public attention is repeatedly diverted towards spectacles that are easy to consume, emotionally satisfying, and politically inconsequential.

A protest is no longer evaluated based on the legitimacy of its demands but on who attended it, what they wore, and whether they appeared sincere enough. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the way protests are discussed. Instead of debating the issue being protested, whether inflation, education, labour rights, or governance failures, the conversation shifts to questions of optics. Was the protest genuine? Was it politically motivated? The actual grievance disappears beneath layers of performative scrutiny. The protest itself becomes secondary to a manufactured culture-war narrative. Social media algorithms amplify this tendency by rewarding outrage and ridicule over analysis and understanding.

The Indian middle class plays a central role in this transformation. Historically, the middle class imagined itself as the custodian of democratic accountability. Today, however, large sections of it display a peculiar political amnesia regarding substantive issues. Large corruption scandals contributed significantly to the downfall of the UPA government in 2014. Since then, corruption as a political issue has largely vanished from mainstream discourse and public memory. There has not been a major corruption controversy capable of dominating public debate, largely because corruption has, in many ways, been institutionalised or legalised through opaque mechanisms. Any attempt to question the constitutionality or ethics of such arrangements is often dismissed through labels such as anti-national, anti-development, tukde-tukde gang or Khan Market gang.

People continue to suffer from rising food and fuel prices, stagnant wages, a scarcity of quality jobs beyond exploitative gig work, and increasingly unaffordable housing. Students repeatedly see their efforts undermined by examination paper leaks. These are tangible issues that affect a vast majority of the population. Yet what dominates conversations in public parks, WhatsApp groups, Facebook comment sections, and the endless stream of short-form videos consumed by young people, middle-aged uncles, and even senior citizens? Debates about melody, demographic change, hyper-nationalism, anti-nationalism, and various forms of identity politics.

The public appears increasingly concerned with an abstract notion of national pride, a concept often as vague as Vishwa Guru. What does the pride of a country actually mean in international relations and foreign policy, where relationships between nation-states are overwhelmingly transactional? It is often futile to explain that nation-states are not human beings. They do not possess emotions, pride, or feelings. Most international engagements are governed by interests and negotiated exchanges.

The closest analogy to a nation-state is perhaps a publicly listed company, with elected representatives serving as a board of directors and the government as executive management responsible for day-to-day operations. Their responsibility is to maximise the well-being of shareholders, namely the citizens, by managing resources efficiently and engaging with other countries in ways that produce equitable outcomes for the population.

The result is a politics of distraction. Political actors across the spectrum increasingly understand that controlling narratives is often more important than solving problems. If public attention can be redirected towards a samosa, a slogan, a dress code, or a personality clash, difficult questions about governance can be postponed indefinitely. The tragedy is that the very people most affected by economic and social challenges often become participants in this diversion. The middle class, squeezed by rising costs and diminishing opportunities, spends more time debating political theatre than examining the structural forces shaping its own future.

Another manifestation of this collective political dementia is the high-handedness and holier-than-thou attitude displayed by sections of the ruling class and those in positions of power. There is an increasing tendency to dismiss anyone who raises uncomfortable questions as armchair philosophers, andolanjeevis, cockroaches or some other convenient caricature. Such individuals are deliberately pitted against the very middle class that is suffering from governance failures. Instead of demanding accountability from elected governments and public institutions, accountability is increasingly demanded from activists, opposition voices, and ordinary citizens who attempt to draw attention to real issues.

In a functioning democracy, power must answer to the people. Yet increasingly, the burden of justification appears to have shifted from those who govern to those who are seen as cockroaches. That inversion may be one of the most troubling features of contemporary public discourse.