Imagining a New Parliament

On 28 May 2023, India’s new Parliament building was officially inaugurated by the Prime Minister in front of a large crowd of guests and parliamentarians. The new structure—which is triangular in design and includes an enhanced seating capacity of up to 384 seats in the Rajya Sabha Hall and 888 seats in the Lok Sabha Hall—is a component of the central vista redevelopment project, which seeks to revamp several nationally significant institutions located in Lutyens’ Delhi. The construction of the new Parliament building was completed in a large measure during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is among the first structures in this redevelopment plan to have been officially inaugurated.

However, the grand inauguration ceremony of the new Parliament was notable for several reasons. The ceremony was conspicuous by the absence of many parliamentarians from the opposition parties. These members of Parliament stayed out of the ceremony as a protest against the government’s studied failure to exclude the President from the ceremony, a titular but the highest constitutional authority in India, who was seemingly sidelined in the whole inauguration process. Predictably, the Prime Minister took centre stage in the elaborately theatrical inauguration ceremony, where unelected priests seemed to outnumber or outshine even elected parliamentarians in the inauguration process. The opposition also questioned the choice of the date for this inauguration, which coincided with the birth anniversary of V D Savarkar, one of the leading ideologues of the Hindu rashtra.