Vaibhav Kharat, Ganesh Pandit
A House Full of Noise, Still Nobody Listened: A Reading of Maharashtra’s Monsoon Session 2025
It was raining outside here in Delhi. And inside the Maharashtra Vidhan Bhavan, it was storming. But not the kind that brings change. Thunder roared, voices clashed, cameras blinked, and something essential was missing: ‘the people’. The real people. The ones who wake up to unpaid loans, overflowing drains, potholes, and ration shops that turn them away. The ones who are never inside the House, but whose lives are shaped by everything that happens or doesn’t happen there.
This year’s Maharashtra Monsoon Session (June 30 to July 18) began with tall promises and ended, as many did, with a pile of bills, bruises, betrayals, and bitter silences. As a student of sociology and as someone who comes from the same textured soil where democracy is not an abstract idea but a lifeline, I watched this session not with detachment, but with a broken heart and sharpened ears.
Let’s not speak only of what the Assembly passed. Let’s talk about what it allowed to pass by. This article is not an attempt to summarise the legislative logbook of 2025. That task will be fulfilled by circulars, not by sociologists. Instead, what follows is a sociological reading of the power, performances, silences, and symbolic violences that unfolded inside and outside the Assembly of Maharashtra. Read this not from the vantage point of neutrality, but from the moral obligation of critical engagement. Because if you listen closely, even the silence in the legislature speaks. And it often screams.
The Session Begins: And So Does the Spectacle
The Monsoon Session began, as always, with promises, debates on welfare bills, educational reforms, and language policy. But within hours, the media focus had shifted from policy to provocation, pride to prejudices. Supporters of BJP MLA Gopichand Padalkar clashed violently with those of NCP(SP) leader Jitendra Awhad. Not inside the House, but on its steps publicly, gladly, madly, and shamelessly. It showed us that politics today is less about vision and more about visibility, less about representing the people and more about performing power for television crews. What we saw wasn’t chaos. It was choreography.
One may call it a security lapse; actually, it was. But as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would remind us, there are no pure accidents in power spaces/fields, only performances, mostly performative. The violence wasn’t a deviation from parliamentary routine; it was an extension of it. In the place of debate, we had brawls. In place of dissent, we had dismissals. In place of discussion, we had Dhishum-dhishum. This is what Bourdieu called symbolic power and symbolic violence in terms of when domination becomes so normalised that it hides itself in the very tools, rituals, and regulations of the institution. Here, the legislature’s marble steps weren’t just stained by the scuffle. They became symbols of a deeper erosion of democratic ethos.
When Language is More Than Grammar
Midway through the session came a proposal to introduce Hindi as a compulsory third language in primary schools. The backlash was swift, and the government backed off. But the idea was floated. And ideas are like seeds. They grow if left unchecked. This was a curriculum tweak with a cultural message. It told Maharashtrians, their own tongues, that their languages, their memories, their marker of identity, belonging, space, and historical struggles are second-class. In a state with a robust Marathi consciousness and a growing assertion of Bahujan linguistic cultures, this top-down imposition was more than a curricular change—it was a cultural intrusion
Why is this significant? Because language is part and parcel of identity and inheritance. It is the way a grandmother scolds you or a father blesses you before your board exams. When the state decides which language belongs in your classroom, it decides what culture belongs in your future. What happens when the language of your ancestors becomes second-class in your own land? Bourdieu might answer: You are asked to exist, but not to express. This was not a debate on multilingualism; it was a quiet attempt to erase political memory, homogenise difference, and enforce a new cultural order, subtly but effectively.
A Law That Wasn’t Loud, But Should Have Been
And then came the real earthquake. With barely a ripple in public discourse, the Legislative Council passed the Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill, a law that expands the state’s powers to clamp down on “threats to public order.” The language is vague, while the implications are enormous.
Opposition leaders called it unconstitutional. Activists worried about its potential to criminalise protests. But the media moved on as it always did. It didn’t trend. It didn’t stir outrage. And perhaps that was the most frightening part. And here, Noam Chomsky’s warnings: Authoritarianism does not always arrive with tanks; sometimes, it arrives with laws. It gives the government an instrument to interpret dissent as disturbance. It gives the government sweeping powers to declare protests and gatherings as threats to public order. Who decides what is “order”? Who defines “disturbance”? We know the answers. And we know who will suffer: professors, journalists, activists, social workers, students, labour unions, farmers, slum dwellers, and the very communities that made democracy worth fighting for.
The Pain That Didn’t Get a Microphone
Now let’s talk about the most important issue of all. The things that were not talked about. Since April, over 700 farmers have taken their own lives in Maharashtra. It’s a number that should haunt us. But it was barely mentioned in the Assembly. Not as an urgent crisis. Not even as a full debate.
There was no serious discussion on Dalit sanitation workers dying in manholes. No policy push for protecting informal workers in Mumbai and Pune who face eviction, inflation, and growing hate.
You see, this silence is not passive. It is violent. It tells the hungry child, the jobless youth, the mosque blast in Beed, and the teenage girl from Dombivali that “You do not matter. You are not worth the time of this House.”
Why? Because these are not “symbol-friendly” issues. You cannot campaign on farmer pain the way you can on bulldozer justice. You cannot televise urban Dalit sanitation workers dying in manholes the way you can televise Assembly walkouts. What’s invisible is often most urgent—and most inconvenient.
Wright Mills famously spoke of the “sociological imagination” as the link between private troubles and public issues. When 767 farmers take their lives, it’s not a series of private tragedies. It’s a public emergency. And when legislators treat it as a statistical footnote, they are complicit in the crisis.
Names Matter, But So Do People
This session also saw a fresh proposal to rename the town of “Islampur” to “Ishwarpur.” Another symbolic act. Another attempt at rewriting geography to erase history. The logic, as always, is couched in “cultural pride.” But whose culture gets to be proud? And at what cost? It is easier to rename towns than to reform towns. Easier to change signboards than sewer systems. The politics of renaming is not about dignity – it is about dominance. It allows the state to perform activity while avoiding accountability.
The working-class Muslims of Islampur will not gain water, education, or housing by this cosmetic change. What they will gain is exclusion from memory, from maps, from national belonging. And that, again, is symbolic violence at its most insidious.
Where Do We Go From Here?
To be clear, not everything was bleak. The session saw the repeal of certain outdated land division rules and the tabling of welfare schemes like Ladki Bahin, aimed at empowering women. The few progressive motions passed during this session are dwarfed by the erosion of democratic grammar we witnessed through aggression, apathy, and authoritarian gestures.
The legislature is meant to be a mirror of the people. But this one looked increasingly like a screen – projecting performances instead of reflecting realities. The Monsoon Session 2025 should not be remembered for the bills it passed, but for the voices it ignored. And as citizens, as scholars, and as moral agents in this wounded republic, we must resist the comfort of forgetting. Because democracy is not sustained by rituals. It is sustained remembrance, outrage, and solidarity.
To quote George Orwell, “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.” This vigilance must now extend not just to the acts of the state, but to its silences, its symbolism, and its sly reshaping of what is allowed to be said. And what is allowed to be suffered. If we fail to read the signs now, we may soon find ourselves locked out of the very institutions that were built in our name.
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Vaibhav Kharat, is a Ph.D. Research Scholar in Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, New Delhi.
Ganesh Pandit, is a LL.B student from Delhi University
