New Delhi has been unusually hot lately. WikiLeaks, that slow smelter of our world, ‘exposed’ what the Dilliwallas were nearly convinced about: that in its previous edition, the present United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had stuffed free floaters of parliament with loads of cash so they would vote for it during a floor testing ritual in July 2008. The votes were necessary for the government to survive. The government was necessary for the nuclear deal to get by. It had been done in the past. There was an immoral norm which the UPA government followed. Allegedly.

In a season of scams – even without interest, the money lost in the 2G scam would have covered for over three years of India’s total education expenditure – why must this exposé be surprising? For the instructive response from the Indian prime minister: he found the allegations “speculative, unverified and unverifiable.” He went on to remind Parliament the result of general elections held after the test vote. The BJP lost 22, I am doing the math to make a point, the Left 35. But Congress? It gained 61 seats! Given his facility with numbers, the point the Prime Minister was making was this: what happened during the last parliament cannot be established. And even if it can be, it doesn’t matter. Because you, who suspect my government’s conduct, got drubbed at the polls. His all-weather deputy, Pranab Mukherjee, fared even better: “Each Lok Sabha is sovereign in its time,” he said. “What happened in the 14th Lok Sabha cannot be decided in the 15th Lok Sabha.”

Let us wait before we extend the logic of this argument.

These responses sum up a recent story of India’s parliamentary democracy. The Westminsterium grafted on Delhi in 1947 began scattering since the late-1980s. When the Age of Coalitions privileged government survival over parliamentary ethics, Indian democracy moved from being an ethical idea to an arithmetical puzzle. The sanguine could expect some harmony of interest to emerge from disagreeing allies. Coalitions ultimately reflected a deepening of democracy.

An irony has also deepened alongside. The grammar of Indian politics (let us put representative parliamentary democracy as its fundamental rule) has been reworked by individuals of interesting representative character. As in economics, the prime minister has made distinguished contribution to this political trend. Never a mass politician, never a politician really, he contested popular elections once and lost. For a representative parliamentary democracy, he appears a deeply unrepresentative leader. Yet, over the last two decades his vision has profoundly reoriented India in at least three arenas – economy, foreign affairs and lately education.

Parliamentary democracies work through dialogical persuasion. The new Indian variant appears to be advancing through dialectical contradictions. Imagine a Nehru, immense charismatic legitimacy on his side, patiently converting the inconsequential opposition to the government’s platform. The current prime minister, even in the face of cacophonic opposition, mostly prefers silence to dialogue. His occasional remarks indicate less an enthusiasm for norms of accountability and more an exercise in good riddance. Many wonder how such a deeply unrepresentative personality could lead the world’s largest and most complicated experiment in representative politics.

The answer lies in a remarkably deft tactic whereby his personal integrity has been substituted for representativeness. The emphasis on his unimpeachable personal integrity, reinforced periodically by the Indian media, has allowed him to levitate clean above the pitfalls of coalition politics. One the one hand, this has allowed his government to effect vast changes in the content of Indian politics. On the other, precisely these ambitious alterations have deepened the contradiction of representative democracy in India. An ‘apolitical’ prime minister, with technocratic work ethics, has transformed Indian politics in scope perhaps exceeding Nehru.

I have no reasons to doubt the prime minister’s personal sincerity either. More importantly, I do not think the contradiction facing Indian democracy is reducible to an individual. However, that contradiction cannot be understood without putting him at the centre (those familiar with Indian politics are free to read the pun).

That contradiction is this. The more the prime minister has sought to be apolitical, the more difficult he has found to moderate the impulses of corruption inherent in coalition politics. I suspect his personal integrity has, over time, become an impediment to discharging the obligations he must as a parliamentary leader. For long, he expressed his unwillingness to soil the self. Until the 2G scam broke out, he was loath to admit the compulsions of coalition politics. (In fact, the July 2008 crisis occurred precisely because he chose to stake the government rather than compromise with the Left, the major coalition partner.)

But the contradictions have caught up faster than either he or the government could anticipate. As long as the sordid stories of scams remained domestically confined, the situation appeared manageable. WikiLeaks changed that. The problem wasn’t that the prime minister’s response was substantially unconvincing. That it was. More instructive was that it betrayed an almost profound lack of understanding of representative politics and parliamentary democracy. By the logic of his own argument, the prime minister should not claim any credit for the achievements of UPA government during its first edition.

Such an idea of parliamentary sovereignty is obviously absurd. But does anyone see the bigger problem?

Atul Mishra teaches politics and international relations at Central University of Gujarat, Gandhinagar, India. Views expressed are personal.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.