When Parliament Goes Silent, Politics Switches On The Camera

By K Raveendran

India’s political conversation appears to be acquiring a new address. It is no longer confined to Parliament House, party headquarters, election rallies or television studios. Increasingly, it begins with a mobile phone placed at a flattering angle, a carefully chosen background and the familiar instruction to look into the camera and speak directly to the people.

The shift has become particularly visible as parliamentary proceedings are repeatedly disrupted by protests, slogans, adjournments and competing demonstrations of indignation. Members may still enter the House, sign the register and occupy their allotted seats, but the message they want the public to hear is often delivered elsewhere. By the time Parliament settles down, if it settles down at all, ministers and opposition leaders may already have posted their arguments on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or X.

This is not merely a technological adjustment. It represents an emerging grammar of political communication. Parliament traditionally required a speaker to address the Chair, respect procedural limits, anticipate interruptions and submit claims to immediate challenge. Social media offers a more comfortable arrangement. The politician addresses the nation without facing the nation’s representatives. There are no points of order, no supplementary questions and no inconvenient member rising from the opposite benches with a document.

Even lawmakers staying away from proceedings, whether in protest or because the House has been adjourned, can remain energetically present in public life. Absence from Parliament no longer necessarily means absence from politics. A leader can boycott the House in the morning, record a video in the afternoon and trend nationally before dinner. Democracy has discovered remote working.

The sharpest illustration came when Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a video responding to the political and emotional fallout from youth anger over examination failures, paper leaks and the credibility of recruitment systems. The protests had brought young people to Delhi’s Jantar Mantar and turned what might once have been treated as an administrative controversy into a national argument about fairness, opportunity and accountability.

A direct intervention by Modi on such a subject was striking precisely because it was unusual. The Prime Minister is one of the world’s most experienced political communicators and has built an enormous digital following. Yet much of his communication is delivered through formal speeches, scheduled broadcasts, public events and tightly framed messages. A video addressing the anxieties behind a street protest appeared almost conversational by comparison.

So unexpected was the presentation that the machinery of artificial intelligence and platform moderation appeared to suffer a technological crisis. Systems designed to detect impersonation and manipulated political content were confronted with an authentic video that seemingly looked less familiar than the synthetic material circulating in abundance. The episode carried the delicious possibility that artificial intelligence had seen so many manufactured versions of political reality that reality itself had begun to look suspicious.

Meta’s India leadership was consequently drawn into scrutiny over content moderation and the handling of political videos. This added another layer of absurdity to an already serious dispute. The government was trying to communicate with young citizens through a private global platform, the platform’s automated systems were attempting to determine what was genuine, and its executives were being asked to explain why the digital gatekeeper had mishandled the message of the elected head of government.

The incident offers a glimpse of the complications ahead. Political legitimacy once depended largely on votes, parliamentary numbers and constitutional office. It must now also pass through algorithms that classify, recommend, restrict, label or remove content. A prime minister may possess a parliamentary majority and still find himself temporarily overruled by a content-filtering system that has never contested an election.

Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party movement, responded in the language that has helped make the youth agitation politically potent: irreverence. He commented on Modi’s appearance in the video, suggesting that the Prime Minister’s skin appeared to be shining more brightly than the affairs of the country.

The line was playful, personal and perfectly designed for social media circulation. It also reflected a wider feature of the protest. The movement has used humour not to escape the gravity of examination failures but to make that gravity harder to ignore. Bureaucratic scandals are often wrapped in technical language: irregularities, procedural lapses, compromised testing mechanisms and corrective measures. Satire removes the wrapping.

Dipke’s quip could be dismissed as an influencer-style jab, but that would miss its political function. It reduced the production values of official communication to a comparison between visual polish and administrative performance. The criticism was not that the video looked good. It was that millions of young people believe the systems governing their futures do not work nearly as smoothly.

The growing preference for video communication also reflects Parliament’s declining usefulness as a platform for sustained political explanation. When proceedings are repeatedly washed out, every party has an incentive to prepare its own version of events. The government says the opposition prevented debate. The opposition says the government avoided accountability. Both then upload evidence supporting their own account.

The result is not one national conversation but several parallel broadcasts. Parliament was designed to bring disagreement into a common chamber. Social media allows every political formation to construct its own chamber, fill the visitors’ gallery with supporters and switch off comments when the debate becomes uncomfortable.

Government functionaries have understandably embraced the format. A short video gives a minister the opportunity to explain a decision without depending on newspapers, television channels or parliamentary reporting. It can reach citizens instantly and in several languages. It can also correct misinformation before it hardens into accepted wisdom.

There are democratic advantages in this directness. Public communication need not remain trapped in official statements written in a dialect understood mainly by bureaucrats and lawyers. A minister speaking plainly into a camera may explain more in three minutes than a departmental press release manages in six pages. Younger citizens are also more likely to encounter a video in their feed than to read a parliamentary transcript.

But direct communication becomes problematic when it replaces accountable communication. A video is a statement, not a debate. It permits the speaker to choose the question, edit the answer and control the emotional temperature. Parliament, at its best, offers precisely the opposite conditions. It exposes authority to interruption, contradiction and unscripted pressure.

The irony is that every political party complains about the weakening of Parliament while contributing, in different ways, to its loss of relevance. Governments often prefer legislative speed and message discipline. Opposition parties increasingly rely on disruption when they believe normal procedures will not secure attention. Each side then points to the other as the reason meaningful debate has become impossible. (IPA Service)