Jan Mahabhiyog: The Door to India’s Parliament Did Not Slam Shut. It Simply Did Not Open

There is an irony that history did not plan but would not have bothered to avoid.

Before it was Rajaji Marg, the avenue in Lutyens’ Delhi was King George’s Avenue. It was laid out so that power could ride in procession past the governed. It was later renamed for C. Rajagopalachari, the first and last Indian Governor-General, the man who stood at the hinge between a crown and a republic. On October 31, 2026, a lawn on that avenue hosted something neither the King nor the Governor-General could have imagined. Twenty-one parties of the INDIA bloc gathered to put the nation’s chief referee of elections on public trial.

Denied the use of other venues, they assembled at 10 Rajaji Marg, the official residence of Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. They called it the Jan Mahabhiyog, the People’s Impeachment of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar presided. Each party’s delegation was given floor time, and voice votes were taken. Citizens who had discovered their own absence from the electoral rolls stood up to testify that they existed.

It is tempting to ask the obvious question. Why is the people’s voice being staged on a road built for a king, behind the gates of a minister’s bungalow? The question answers itself. The people’s voice went to Rajaji Marg because every other address had been refused.

“When the chamber will not hear the citizen, the citizen will build a chamber, even if it has to be pitched on a lawn.”

How Democracies are Emptied

Democracies of the twentieth century tended to die with noise: tanks at the radio station, decrees at midnight, constitutions suspended by men in uniform. Twenty-first-century democracies are hollowed in silence.

Sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele named this pattern autocratic legalism. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe a related practice they call constitutional hardball. Neither involves breaking the rules. Both involve playing the rules so hard that the game stops meaning what it meant.

“Democracies no longer die by decree. They die by procedure, one adjournment at a time.”

India’s parliamentary record supplies the evidence without commentary:

• Committee scrutiny: In the 17th Lok Sabha, only 16 percent of bills went to committees, down from 71 percent in the 15th.
• Suspensions: In the Winter Session of December 2023, 146 Opposition MPs were suspended. The criminal law overhaul and the Telecommunications Bill passed through chambers that had been, in effect, de-oppositioned.
• Debate time: About 35 percent of bills passed the Lok Sabha after less than an hour of debate.

Then came the decisive closure. Close to 200 Opposition MPs signed for the removal of the Chief Election Commissioner. The notice was not admitted for debate. The door to the chamber did not slam. It simply did not open.

What does an opposition do when the building remains standing but the function has left it?

A New Concept: Exilic Parliamentarism

The world has seen parliaments in exile. After Myanmar’s 2021 coup, deposed lawmakers formed the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw. They legislated from hiding and abroad, carrying the mandate like a flag folded into a suitcase.

Rajaji Marg was something else. Its members were not exiled from the country. They still held their seats, drew their salaries, and could walk to Parliament House in twenty minutes. What they had been exiled from was the deliberative function of their own chamber.

I propose to call this exilic parliamentarism. It is the condition in which elected representatives, still lawfully in office, find the substance of parliamentary work unavailable inside Parliament. They carry its procedural form outward, the way a refugee carries the habits of a home that still stands but can no longer be lived in.

Exilic parliamentarism has a domestic ancestor. The Kisan Sansad of 2021 met at Jantar Mantar with Speakers, motions, and votes, and helped force the repeal of the farm laws. It also has a moral ancestor. At Kliptown in 1955, the Congress of the People, denied any share in the South African state, wrote the Freedom Charter on open ground. That document outlived the regime that ignored it.

The lesson these assemblies share is quietly profound. Procedure is not merely the furniture of power. It is a language, and a language cannot be confiscated by locking the room where it is usually spoken.

“You can lock a chamber. You cannot lock a grammar.”

The Shadow and the Substance

Westminster solved part of this problem centuries ago, and named it with untranslatable courtesy: His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition. The British opposition maintains a shadow cabinet. Each minister is matched by a rival who scrutinizes them, rehearses alternatives, and stands ready to govern. The shadow is not an insult to the substance. It is the substance’s conscience, institutionalized.

India has never formalized a shadow government. The Jan Mahabhiyog can be read as an improvised substitute, a shadow chamber assembled in the absence of one. Its merits deserve to be stated plainly:

• It preserved the rituals of accountability. In a season when those rituals were being starved inside Parliament, it kept them alive: the motion, the hearing, the vote.
• It turned statistics back into people. A deleted name in a database is a cell. A deleted voter at a microphone is a citizen. The assembly restored a face to the abstraction.
• It made the opposition legible as an alternative state. It showed that the opposition could run a disciplined proceeding and not only a rally. This is the real function of a shadow: to show that power has a successor-in-waiting.
• It re-politicized what had been depoliticized. Chantal Mouffe warns that technocracy dissolves conflict into administration. The assembly insisted that the revision of rolls is not clerical work but a question of who belongs to the republic.
• It built what Nancy Fraser calls a subaltern counterpublic. This is an arena where those excluded from official discourse can name their grievances in their own words, before an audience that takes them seriously.

Exilic parliamentarism is the condition in which elected representatives, still lawfully in office, find the substance of parliamentary work unavailable inside Parliament. They carry its procedural form outward, the way a refugee carries the habits of a home that still stands but can no longer be lived in.

A Second Concept: Legitimacy in Escrow

Article 324(5) of the Constitution protects the Chief Election Commissioner as it protects a judge of the Supreme Court. Removal requires a supermajority the opposition does not possess. Legally, the Jan Mahabhiyog could remove no one. So what did it actually do?

I propose a second concept: legitimacy in escrow.

In law, escrow holds something of value in suspension. It is neither surrendered nor released until certain conditions are met. Institutions can fall into the same condition. Their legal authority remains intact, but a substantial part of the public withholds its trust and holds it pending proof.

The People’s Impeachment did not revoke the Commission’s legitimacy, because it could not. Instead, it placed that legitimacy in escrow, publicly and on the record. The release conditions are also clear: transparent audits, verifiable deletion records, and answers given in a forum where questions can be asked back.

Escrow is a precise condition. It is not a verdict of guilt. It is a demand for evidence. That precision is what separates epistemic impeachment—an attack on an institution’s claim to be believed—from mere denunciation.

“An institution can survive the loss of its critics’ votes. It cannot long survive the loss of its citizens’ belief.”

A Third Concept: The Subtracted Citizen

Most forms of injustice announce themselves. A beating is felt and a law is read. Disenfranchisement by deletion is different. It is discovered.

Call this figure the subtracted citizen: a person whose citizenship is not taken from them in any act they witness, but found missing at the moment they try to use it. They arrive at the booth on election day to learn that, in the only ledger that counts, they have quietly ceased to exist.

“The subtracted citizen is the only victim who learns of the crime from an absence.”

This is why the testimonies at Rajaji Marg carried a weight that no statistic can. Each witness was answering a question the state had never asked them aloud: are you still here?

The Case for the Referee

Neutrality is not a courtesy in an essay like this. It is the price of being believed. So the Election Commission’s case must be heard in full.

The ECI holds that the Special Intensive Revision is a lawful, long-established exercise. Its purpose is to purge duplicate, untraceable, and deceased entries from rolls swollen by decades of migration. The Commission points to three safeguards:

• door-to-door verification by Booth Level Officers;
• a tiered process of claims and appeals;
• the presence of every major party’s own Booth Level Agents when draft rolls are published.

On this account, a clean roll is not an attack on democracy but one of its preconditions.

The Opposition’s charge is that the cleaning cut into living tissue. It alleges that software-driven flagging, the processing of objections and deletions under Form 7, and the speed of the SIR removed lakhs of genuine voters without adequate notice.

And there is one hard truth the Jan Mahabhiyog cannot escape. It was a trial without a defendant. The Commission was not present, was not cross-examined, and could not reply. A proceeding with one side is a testimony, not a trial. Its moral force is real, but its evidentiary force is incomplete.

“A people’s court that hears only the people is still a court of one side, and history audits both.”

The Lawn Is a Waiting Room

So which is it: a shadow republic in rehearsal, or a theater of the excluded?

The honest answer is that exilic parliamentarism is a double-edged instrument. In the short term it keeps the grammar of accountability alive, gives the subtracted citizen a stage, and places an institution’s legitimacy in escrow. In the long term it carries a quiet danger. Every assembly convened on a lawn is also an admission that the real chamber has stopped working. A replica performed too often can normalize the absence of the original.

The Kisan Sansad mattered because it was attached to a reversible demand and to sustained mass pressure, and the laws were repealed. The CRPH endured because the coup had left no legitimate chamber to defer to. Whether Rajaji Marg joins that company will not be decided on the lawn. It will be decided in what follows: audits that can be checked, litigation that can be won, and ballots that can be counted without dispute.

Democracy has always had two addresses: the chamber where it is formalized and the open ground where it is reclaimed. Neither is enough alone. A chamber without the street becomes a club. A street without the chamber becomes a cry.

“The lawn is not where democracy goes to die. It is where democracy goes to wait—and a republic is judged by how long it makes its citizens wait outside.”

Note: The three named concepts (exilic parliamentarism, legitimacy in escrow, the subtracted citizen) are coined here. I cannot guarantee that no one has ever used these phrases anywhere, but they are defined freshly and are not borrowed from existing literature. I also wrote from memory that Rajaji Marg was formerly King George’s Avenue.

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Satish Jha, former Editor, Indian Express Group and The Times of India Group writes on geopolitics, international affairs, and development.