Late night on Tuesday, India’s Congress MP Shashi Tharoor stood up in the Lok Sabha with nine minutes on the clock. The bill under debate was India’s anti-paper-leak law. Tharoor’s point was engaging and harder to dismiss: the country’s public examination system needs structural reform that prevents leaks, rather than relying only on harsher punishment once the damage is done. Right then his mic was cut and the House moved to other business. But it didn’t really matter. Tharoor had built the argument anyway, on the record, in the shape a policy debate is supposed to take and it was covered widely in the Indian media.

The next afternoon, in the same chamber, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi produced a different kind of moment. Defending the nationwide student protests over the paper leak as a peaceful expression of youthful aspiration, he recounted a conversation with an eighteen-year-old who’d sorted people into three categories: students, idiots, and andhbhakts who follow the idiots. The side of parliament where ruling party MPs and ministers sit erupted. One of the ministers rose to demand that the word “idiot” be struck from the record as unparliamentary. Speaker Om Birla had to intervene repeatedly just to restore order.

The two instances, to outsiders and those in the ruling benches, may appear lacking in discipline. But this is what a parliamentary system actually looks like — those in the ruling segment can’t ignore the people arguing with it.

Go further out West and this model gets sharper. In the UK, British Prime Minister’s Questions is a much mocked ritual, one that has now outlasted seven different prime ministers just in the past decade. The thirty minutes of unscripted, grandiose session produces more heat than information. But beneath the mockery is a format that forces accountability. In April, Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle stopped Prime Minister Keir Starmer mid-session and told him plainly that it was Prime Minister’s Questions, not a chance to attack the opposition leader instead of answering. The rebuke was serious enough that Starmer, who left office earlier this month, confronted him about it afterward. Hoyle’s office was unapologetic, telling reporters that reminding a prime minister of the rules of engagement is simply part of the job, and that this wasn’t a one-off.

There’s a common thread in both examples: the Speaker’s party doesn’t decide which way he leans once he’s in the chair. Om Birla is a ruling Bharatiya Janata Party MP, but he has to rule on the minister’s objection. Lindsay Hoyle came up through Parliament as a Labour MP, and he still pulled up a Labour prime minister for dodging questions. In a parliamentary system, that chair asks something drastically different of the person than the party did.

Nepal’s Speaker Dol Prasad Aryal walked into the chair straight from being the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s vice-chair, elected unopposed because his party holds a near two-thirds majority in the House. Opposition lawmakers have spent months accusing him of failing to compel Shah’s appearance and of leaning toward the government. On Thursday, he faced a test: lawmaker after lawmaker rose demanding the government answer for the communal violence in Sunsari district and the prime minister’s absence from it, and Aryal had the authority to rule that the House was owed a response. He failed.

This brings us to the elephant in the room, the prime minister himself. Balendra Shah has faced the parliament exactly once, on May 31, and it looked nothing like the Question Hour. It was his first session answering lawmakers. He was asked about the old border dispute with India, he said Nepal had also encroached on Indian land in places — a fact, he said, he’d only learned after taking office — and suggested the UK be brought in to help resolve it alongside India. You’d think a government would spend days, even weeks, preparing a statement like that before saying it on the record. Shah delivered it like an aside.

The backlash was immediate. The Nepali Congress and CPN-UML demanded he retract the statement, produce evidence, and apologize. Former Nepali ambassadors to India said publicly that no such encroachment had ever been documented. Opposition lawmakers picketed the well of the House and called for his resignation. Shah did not come back to answer follow-up questions. When his own party’s chief whip was asked why, the answer was the government’s own defense: parliamentary rules don’t require the prime minister’s personal presence, and a minister can respond on his behalf.

When Shah did resurface again, this time on June 1, it wasn’t to answer for the substance. He arrived unannounced, addressed the House briefly through the Speaker, and repeated the claim rather than walk it back. Opposition Chief Whip Ain Bahadur Mahar’s complaint that day said as much about the moment as the remark itself: he objected not only to what Shah had said, but to what he’d worn as he said it, arguing the prime minister was dressed for the football pitch rather than Parliament. Two months later, Shah still hasn’t addressed the House on the matter again.

This week, the pattern became impossible to ignore. As communal unrest that started on Sunday spread across towns in the southern plains, the death toll rose to three. Shah skipped the all-party meeting his own coalition partner convened to address the situation, and he addressed the killings only through a Facebook post. Speaker Aryal met with Shah on Tuesday and told him “it would be good” if he kept the House informed about the country’s current situation. Shah’s response? “I’ll think about it.”

When the Parliament finally reconvened on Thursday after a 15-day recess, it gave the crisis unfolding in the southern plains a special hour. Shah, once again, was nowhere to be seen. Most of the lawmakers who spoke, including former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, used their time to ask where Shah was; Dahal pointedly noted that the prime minister and his home minister had also skipped the all-party meeting. Aryal had the chance to rule that the government owed the House an answer, but he said nothing. Instead of forcing one, he adjourned the session again — this time for five days. Hours later, Shah addressed the nation for the first time since taking office, in a pre-recorded video that was posted on his personal Facebook page.

Nepal has all the same paper machinery as Delhi or London. It has a chapter of procedure devoted to questioning the prime minister directly. Even KP Sharma Oli — a prime minister widely criticized for his governing style — kept showing up to take questions from the opposition, session after session. He’d occasionally refuse to answer one he didn’t like, calling it hostile, but he came back the next time anyway.

Balendra Shah has refused to come back at all.