By: Peerzada Muneer
Parliamentary democracy in India rests on the twin pillars of the House of the People (Lok Sabha) and the House of the States (Rajya Sabha), and the winter or pre-Budget session is one of the key institutional rituals through which this democratic architecture regularly tests, renews, and sometimes exposes its own strengths and weaknesses. Situated at the end of the parliamentary calendar, the winter session functions as a compact arena where the representative will of the people and the federal voice of the states confront urgent policy questions, contentious legislation, and pre-Budget signalling, thereby revealing the deeper philosophy and current challenges of India’s parliamentary system.
Parliamentary democracy, in its classical Westminster form, is built on the fusion of the executive and legislature, cabinet responsibility to the popularly elected lower house, and the centrality of debate and questioning in controlling governmental power. India’s Constitution-makers consciously adopted this model but adapted it to a vast, diverse, federal republic, creating a bicameral Parliament in which the Lok Sabha embodies democratic popular sovereignty while the Rajya Sabha institutionalises the federal principle and continuity in governance. Article 79 anchors this design by constituting Parliament as the President and two Houses, but crucially makes the Council of Ministers collectively responsible only to the Lok Sabha, thereby ensuring that governments in India are born and unmade on the floor of the House of the People, not in the Council of States. This asymmetry reflects a normative choice: in a parliamentary democracy, the executive must remain answerable first to citizens’ directly elected representatives, even as a second chamber slows legislation, voices state interests and guards against transient majoritarian impulses.
Historically, the creation of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha in 1952 was the culmination of an incremental colonial experiment with representative institutions, beginning with limited legislative councils under the Indian Councils Acts and moving through the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, which gradually expanded Indian participation but maintained a narrow franchise and strong executive dominance. The Constituent Assembly, functioning as both a constitution-making and a provisional legislature between 1946 and 1950, debated whether India needed a second chamber at all, with critics warning that it might reproduce elitism and delay social reform, while supporters argued that federalism, diversity, and the need for a revising chamber justified a Council of States. The eventual compromise produced a directly elected Lok Sabha with a maximum strength of 552 (now 543 elected seats after abolition of Anglo-Indian nominations) and a Rajya Sabha with up to 250 members, elected by state legislatures through proportional representation with a small nominated component, thus blending democratic, federal, and deliberative ideals in a single institutional design.
The Lok Sabha, as the House of the People, is the site where universal adult suffrage translates into national political power, and its composition mirrors demographic and territorial representation across states and union territories. Members are elected from single-member constituencies under a first-past-the-post system, with seats apportioned broadly in proportion to state populations and specific reservations for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, making the Lok Sabha the principal vehicle through which historically marginalised groups gain descriptive representation at the Union level. Constitutionally, the Lok Sabha is primus inter pares among the two Houses: it alone can introduce money bills, holds decisive power in budget approval, can bring down governments through no-confidence motions, and dominates joint sittings because of its much larger numerical strength. These legal advantages are reinforced politically by the centrality of Lok Sabha elections in determining the national executive, which means that party strategies, coalition formation, and legislative time allocation are all heavily shaped by lower house arithmetic, especially during high-stakes sessions such as those preceding the Union Budget.
By contrast, the Rajya Sabha, or Council of States, is designed less as a rival centre of power and more as a chamber of review, federal articulation, and institutional continuity. Its members are elected indirectly by state legislatures using the single transferable vote system, with seats allocated broadly by population, and a small group of distinguished persons nominated by the President to bring expertise in fields such as arts, literature, science, and social service into parliamentary deliberations. Rajya Sabha cannot be dissolved; one-third of its members retire every two years, ensuring that at any given time a body of experienced legislators and opposition figures remains in place regardless of electoral waves in the Lok Sabha, a feature that moderates policy volatility and allows sustained committee work across parliamentary terms. While it lacks control over the government’s survival and has only recommendatory powers on money bills, the Rajya Sabha wields unique authority under Articles 249 and 312 to empower Parliament to legislate on State List subjects in the national interest and to create new All-India Services, underlining its special role as guardian of federal equilibrium and long-term institutional capacity.
The relationship between these two Houses is therefore simultaneously cooperative and tension-ridden, structured by constitutional rules yet shaped in practice by party alignments and political strategy. Ordinary legislation must pass both Houses, and when deadlock occurs a joint sitting may be summoned, but this remains rare and is used sparingly because governments often prefer political negotiation, ordinance routes, or sequencing legislation to avoid overt confrontation with an upper house where they may lack a majority. In theory, this bicameral configuration promotes more careful law-making: the popularly driven Lok Sabha articulates electoral mandates and governmental agendas, while the Rajya Sabha revisits clauses, incorporates state concerns and subjects bills to a different partisan configuration, especially when ruling parties are weaker at the state level. In practice, however, critics argue that when the government commands a strong lower house majority and pushes ambitious reform agendas in compressed sessions, the upper house’s revisory role and committees’ scrutiny function can be marginalised, particularly during time-pressed sittings such as the winter session.
The parliamentary year in India is conventionally organised around three sessions: Budget (or Budget-cum-Monsoon in some years of reconfiguration), Monsoon and Winter, each with distinct political and policy functions. The winter session, usually convened between late November and mid-December, marks the end of the calendar year and often the last major opportunity for the government to push through priority legislation before the budget cycle begins, while also providing space for structured debates on pressing issues that emerged during the year. In years where the winter session is framed as a “pre-Budget” sitting or merged with budget discussions, it acquires added importance as a forum for early signalling on fiscal priorities, tax reforms, and sectoral policy directions, allowing both Houses to influence public expectations and stakeholder lobbying ahead of the formal budget presentation. Historically, contentious reforms in sectors such as economic liberalisation, taxation, social welfare, electoral law, and internal security have frequently appeared on winter session agendas, turning this short session into a high-intensity period of negotiation, obstruction, and deal-making between government and opposition.
Contemporary winter sessions highlight both the intended deliberative purpose of Parliament and the pathologies that have accumulated in the system. In recent and upcoming sittings, governments have tended to schedule an ambitious slate of bills, ranging from structural economic reforms, regulatory overhauls in energy and education, to new regulatory architectures in insurance, nuclear power, and securities markets, within a compressed calendar of barely two to three weeks, leading to concerns about inadequate debate and scrutiny. Opposition parties, in turn, have used the symbolic visibility of the winter session to foreground issues such as unemployment, price rise, electoral reforms, federal grievances, and civil liberties, often through coordinated disruptions, walkouts or adjournment motions, which simultaneously register protest and erode the productive time available for routine deliberation. The resultant pattern, visible in productivity statistics compiled by legislative research organisations, shows a long-run decline in effective sitting days and hours, with the winter session particularly vulnerable to washouts because of its brevity and its proximity to state elections or upcoming Lok Sabha contests.
The pre-Budget dimension of the winter session reveals another layer of the philosophy and practice of parliamentary democracy: the balance between fiscal sovereignty of Parliament and executive dominance in financial legislation. In principle, Parliament’s “power of the purse” is exercised through money bills, appropriation acts, and finance bills, all of which originate in the Lok Sabha and are central to democratic control over taxation and expenditure. Yet, in practice, detailed budget-making remains an executive-driven process, and parliamentary influence is channelled primarily through debates, cut motions, questions, and committee reports rather than through systematic amendment of financial proposals, especially because the Rajya Sabha’s role on money bills is limited and time-bound. When winter sessions are used to introduce preparatory or framework financial legislation, such as tax code adjustments, new regulatory institutions, or sectoral incentive schemes, before the main budget, this can either extend Parliament’s opportunity to shape fiscal policy or, when rushed, accentuate the trend towards fast-tracking complex financial changes with limited multi-stage scrutiny.
From a theoretical standpoint, the essence of the House of the People and the House of the States can be read as embodying two complementary democratic ideas: majoritarian responsiveness and constitutional pluralism. The Lok Sabha gives institutional expression to the idea that governments must reflect the periodically renewed preferences of a nationwide electorate, that policy change should be possible when voters clearly support it, and that ministers must face continuous questioning and potential dismissal by representatives who can be turned out at the next election. The Rajya Sabha, by contrast, materialises the notion that in a large federal democracy, the Union’s power must be moderated by territorially organised units with distinct political identities and policy needs, and that legislative judgment should not be entirely synchronised with the electoral cycle of the lower house. The winter session, with its heavy agenda and time pressure, becomes a revealing arena where these two logics interact: the government seeks to demonstrate decisive responsiveness to its mandate, while state-based and opposition forces attempt to insist on more deliberative and pluralistic law-making, often through procedural tactics and committee referrals.
Criticism of India’s parliamentary practice, especially visible during winter sessions, clusters around several recurring themes: declining deliberation, excessive executive control of the agenda, partisan polarisation, and a weakening of accountability mechanisms. Studies on parliamentary performance point to shrinking numbers of sitting days, frequent adjournments, and the passage of significant legislation with minimal discussion, sometimes in the absence of the opposition because of walkouts or suspensions, which undermines the deliberative ideal on which the bicameral structure is justified. The misuse or overuse of ordinances and the guillotining of demands for grants without detailed discussion in the Lok Sabha further reinforce perceptions that budgetary and legislative control has tilted strongly towards the executive, with Parliament often reduced to ratifying decisions shaped elsewhere. In the Rajya Sabha, the growing practice of treating controversial bills with financial implications as “money bills” to bypass the upper house has sparked constitutional debates about the spirit of bicameralism and the integrity of the Council of States’ role, especially when such moves intersect with politically charged winter or pre-Budget sessions.
Another line of critique focuses on party discipline, anti-defection provisions, and the internal functioning of political parties, which together shape the actual behaviour of members in both Houses. The Tenth Schedule, designed to curb rampant defections, effectively compels members to vote according to the party whip on most issues, reducing the space for individual legislators to reflect constituency interests or considered disagreement, and concentrating real legislative power in small party leadership circles that negotiate directly with the executive. This pattern is especially visible in short, high-stakes sessions such as the winter sitting, where party leaderships insist on tight voting cohesion to push through or block key bills, leaving little room for cross-party coalitions or committee-led consensus-building, and thereby weakening the institutional ethos of Parliament as a site of reasoned, plural deliberation rather than pure partisan contestation. Concerns about social representativeness, under-representation of women, minorities and certain regions, further complicate the normative claim that the Houses fully mirror the diversity of Indian society, even as recent elections and state-level churn have begun to modestly broaden the social composition of both chambers.
Yet, despite these criticisms, the winter session and the functioning of the two Houses still periodically demonstrate the resilience and latent potential of parliamentary democracy. There are notable instances where sustained questioning in Question Hour, short duration discussions, or special debates during winter sittings have compelled ministers to clarify policies, withdraw, or significantly amend bills, or rework administrative decisions after cross-party pressure, indicating that even a time-pressed session can exercise a real accountability function when members organise effectively. Department-related standing committees, which draw membership from both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, often undertake detailed scrutiny of bills and budgets referred to them outside the limelight of the main chambers, and their reports sometimes feed into winter or pre-Budget debates, offering empirically grounded critiques and recommendations that governments cannot entirely ignore. Moreover, the very visibility of winter session confrontations, televised proceedings, civil society commentary, and media analyses of legislative performance, creates an external accountability loop in which governments and oppositions are judged by how they use scarce parliamentary time, influencing future electoral narratives, and sometimes prompting procedural reforms or informal norms to improve productivity.
The question of reform, therefore, is less about abandoning parliamentary democracy than about realigning institutional practice with the constitutional philosophy embodied in the House of the People and the House of the States. Proposals emerging from commissions, scholars and civil society include mandating a minimum number of sitting days, rationalising session calendars to avoid ad hoc compressions, strengthening the role and resources of committees, and revisiting anti-defection rules to narrow whips to confidence and money matters so that legislators recover a measure of autonomy in ordinary law-making. Other suggestions focus on improving the quality of deliberation by providing systematic capacity-building for members, expanding non-partisan research support, using technology for better data access in debates, and institutionalising more structured pre-legislative consultation and post-legislative impact assessment, so that sessions such as the winter sitting become genuine forums for evidence-based policy argument rather than ritualised confrontation. For these reforms to succeed, however, political will from party leaderships is essential, because many of the existing distortions, over-centralised control of the agenda, strategic disruptions, and instrumental use of procedural devices, are symptoms of broader electoral and party-system incentives rather than merely technical design flaws in parliamentary rules.
In essence, the winter or pre-Budget session of Parliament functions as a condensed microcosm of India’s parliamentary democracy, bringing into sharp relief the normative ideals, institutional balances and practical tensions between the House of the People and the House of the States. The Lok Sabha asserts its primacy as the locus of popular mandate and executive responsibility, while the Rajya Sabha tests and qualifies that primacy through federal representation, continuity, and revisory powers, even as both operate under increasing time pressure, partisan polarisation, and executive dominance. Whether the system can evolve towards a more deliberative, representative, and accountable practice will depend less on formal constitutional amendments than on how political actors choose to inhabit these institutions, how they use or abuse winter sessions, how they respect or sideline the complementary roles of the two Houses, and how they respond to public expectations that Parliament should be not merely a site of contestation, but also a forum of reasoned, inclusive law-making for a complex republic.
