Narendra Modi’s Potemkin democracy

The country’s old parliament, led by Modi and the BJP, will be left with animated discussions.

Indian legislators woke up in the new year to two realisations. First, the annual winter session of Parliament, from which they should just have been emerging, had not taken place at all. And, second, New Delhi’s magnificent parliament complex, a tourist attraction since it was built in 1927, had been turned into a construction site.