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EARLY ON 28 MAY last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived at Sansad Marg to inaugurate India’s new parliament. Built on a triangular plot adjacent to the old parliament, it was a formidable looking- structure of red and white sandstone, a composite of sharp geometric shapes. The prime minister was dressed in the dhoti attire that he reserves for temple rituals and, after a puja, laid prostrate on the ground to seek the blessings of a row of saffron-clad Hindu priests, who showered him with flowers. With a golden sceptre in hand and the priests following him, Modi entered the building. Vedic chants resounded as he slowly walked through the lotus-themed Lok Sabha chamber up to the speaker’s chair, where the Sengol was then installed. The inauguration was laced with Hindutva rhetoric—it was taking place on the birth anniversary of the Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar, and adorning the walls of the new parliament was a mural depicting “Akhand Bharat,” or “undivided India,” a mythical unified Hindu civilisation spanning the Indian subcontinent.
In a forty-minute celebratory speech, Modi termed the construction of a new parliament a “golden moment” for the country. “This new Parliament House will not only beckon India’s development but also echo the call for global progress,” he said. “This new building will witness the realisation of the aspirations of a developed India.” Modi used the moment to make claims about his party’s achievements. “If I am proud of the new parliament, then I am also satisfied that I could deliver more than four crore houses to the poor,” he said. “If I am proud of the new parliament today, then I am also satisfied that more than 11 crore toilets were built for women in the last nine years.”
Days earlier, 19 opposition parties had announced that they would be boycotting the inauguration. Their joint statement cited, among other reasons, “constitutional impropriety”—President Draupadi Murmu had not been invited. Besides, the statement said, there was no value in a new building when the “soul of democracy has been sucked out from the Parliament.”