A common force that often reshapes the world—people’s determination to be self-defined and self-governed—is at play in India today. On Sunday, the country will inaugurate a new building for the national parliament, but the building itself, intended for civil debates, is already the subject of heated debates. That’s because its design reflects the rise of Hindu nationalism and challenges India’s founding ideals of secular rule and respect for minority religions.
One critic, Shiv Visvanathan, a sociology professor, wrote in the Deccan Herald that the new design “rewrites history and reshapes architecture” with the “majoritarian logic” of the dominant Hindu population. But the new building also has a simple, practical purpose. It replaces a centuries-old building that is dilapidated and poorly equipped. Its cavernous chambers will accommodate more members – which in theory means better representative democracy as India has become the world’s most populous country.
But architecture is never just about use. Through light and structure, buildings can emphasize beauty, perception, listening and integrity. As a visible expression of what the late British political scientist Ben Anderson called the “imagined community” of the nation-state, it projects power and identity.
Completed in 1927, the old Parliament was the centerpiece of a capital city complex that glorified British colonial rule. A huge circular structure, it was reminiscent of both the Roman Colosseum and a Hindu temple built a thousand years ago in the state of Madhya Pradesh – a conscious attempt by its designer to impose Western concepts on Indian sensibilities. “Architecture, more than any other art, represents the intellectual progress of those in authority,” architect Edwin Lutyens declared at the time.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi may well agree. In December 2020 he laid the foundation stone for the new parliament building as part of a broader project to assert a new national identity over the original imperial blueprint of the capital complex. “It is a matter of pride for our compatriots that the new [Parliament] being built by our own people as a prime example of this [a self-reliant India]’ spokesman Om Birla said on the occasion.
Critics of Mr Modi point out that lawmakers neither debated nor approved the project. During his nine-year tenure, he has curtailed the rights of Muslims, undermined the independence of the judiciary, and targeted political opponents and journalists. Sunday’s opening coincides with the annual commemoration of the late founder of Mr Modi and his party’s Hindu nationalist ideology.
Twenty opposition parties had vowed to boycott the building’s inauguration. However, in a joint statement on Wednesday, the 20 parties expressed a tone of reconciliation: “Despite our belief that the government threatens democracy,” they remain “open to resolving our differences and honoring this occasion.”
The architecture of a central government, said the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “marks the center as the center.” But the heated debate that India’s new parliament building has sparked shows that democracy is not proclaimed on stone but – like a former one Justice of India’s Supreme Court once remarked – “with due respect for the ideals of democracy and the rule of law”.
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