I said it is a privilege to be watching India in its new making, and I meant that literally. Most of us only read about moments like this afterwards, in history books. To watch it live — people gathering, speaking, and acting in public, in the open — is different. It does not feel like watching politics from a distance. It feels like watching a country decide, in real time, what it wants to be next.
Yesterday, when Meira Kumar stood forward during the impeachment resolution working meeting, that was the moment it stopped feeling like an ordinary gathering for me.
She was not just present. She stepped forward to preside. A former Speaker of the Lok Sabha, taking the chair, opening the proceedings, and giving the meeting a form and a discipline that people could recognise. That is why it stayed in my mind. The form mattered. It said: this is not chaos, this is a working meeting, with a chair, a motion, and a resolution.
I said I had not seen a working meeting like this in public before, and that is what I meant by unique. It was not held behind closed doors. It was held in the open, with MPs, civil society members, and voters sitting together, speaking about the same question: who gets to vote, and who decides?
A working meeting is usually private — notes, committees, corridors. This one was public by design. People could see the argument being made, the motion being moved, and the resolution being adopted. That openness is part of the point. It turns a meeting into a witness.
I said she was marking the beginning of a new party — and by that I meant a new phase, a new kind of politics taking shape in front of us, not just another day of opposition.
A beginning does not have to be loud to be real. Sometimes it is quiet: a chair taken, a motion read, a room agreeing together. But once that form has been used in public, it cannot be unseen. Other people can pick it up, repeat it, and build on it. That is how a new India gets built — not all at once, but meeting by meeting, in public, until the old way of doing things no longer feels normal.
And I said it is not too soon for the regime to recall. I meant recall in the deepest sense: to remember.
To remember that power in a democracy is borrowed, not owned. That a vote is not a favour granted from above, but a right that belongs to the voter. That if even one eligible voter is denied that right, something essential has been broken.
It is not too soon to say that, because by the time it feels too late, the damage is already done. A warning given early is not impatience. It is care for the thing you do not want to lose.
To be continued — next: what I hope this beginning leads to, and what I am watching for next.