It took 120 seconds to break the Shimla assembly. Two minutes. Most of us spend more time staring at a loading screen or waiting for a microwave burrito to stop being frozen in the middle. But in the grand, wood-paneled theater of the Himachal Pradesh Vidhan Sabha, 120 seconds was enough to trigger a full-scale system crash.

Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla walked in, cracked open the binder containing his address, and essentially clicked “Skip Intro.” He read the first paragraph, skipped the middle 60 pages of government fluff, and stuck the landing on the final sentence. Then he sat down. The legislative equivalent of a speedrun.

The opposition, led by a visible-vein-in-the-forehead Jai Ram Thakur, absolutely lost it. They didn't just walk out; they stormed out, screaming about the "murder of democracy" and the "insult to the House." It’s a familiar script, but this time, the runtime was significantly shorter. Usually, these opening sessions are a marathon of droning accomplishments and optimistic projections—the kind of political ASMR that puts even the most caffeinated journalist to sleep. Instead, we got the TL;DR version.

This isn’t just a scheduling quirk. It’s a glitch in the legacy code of Indian governance.

The friction here isn’t about the Governor’s vocal cords or his lunch plans. It’s about the simmering heat between the Raj Bhavan and Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu’s government. In the current patch notes of Indian politics, the Governor—appointed by the Center—and the State Government—elected by the locals—are rarely running the same software. They clash. They lag. They occasionally hang the entire system.

By cutting the speech to a mere two minutes, the Governor didn't just save time. He signaled that the document he was supposed to read—a glowing review of the Congress government’s performance—wasn’t worth the breath it would take to narrate it. It’s a passive-aggressive power move disguised as efficiency. The BJP is calling it a constitutional crisis. The government is calling it a technicality, pointing out that "laying the speech on the table" counts as reading it under the rules.

Let’s talk about the cost of this particular 120-second performance. A single day of an assembly session costs the taxpayer a staggering amount of money. We’re talking about security, staff, electricity, and the daily allowances for MLAs who mostly spent the afternoon shouting over each other in the corridors. When the centerpiece of the day’s agenda is condensed into the length of a TikTok video, the ROI on that democratic investment looks pretty grim.

It’s the ultimate "This could have been an email" moment.

But the BJP’s outrage feels a bit performed, too. They’re clutching their pearls over the "sanctity of the House," but they’d be the first to cheer if a Governor in a different state pulled the same stunt on a rival party. This is the state of the union: a series of procedural loopholes exploited for maximum optics. The Governor knows the rules. He knows that as long as he reads the beginning and the end, the middle is legally "read." It’s a loophole big enough to drive a motorcade through.

The real losers? The people of Himachal. They’re currently navigating a post-monsoon recovery that’s been anything but smooth. They’re dealing with a state budget that’s leaking air and a series of infrastructure projects that are more "work in progress" than "ready for launch." They could use a serious discussion on policy. Instead, they got a two-minute monologue and a hallway shouting match.

The assembly floor used to be where the heavy lifting happened. Now, it’s just a set for a viral clip. The Governor’s two-minute speed-read wasn't an accident or a sign of a busy schedule. It was a deliberate choice to devalue the ritual. If the opening address—the supposed roadmap for the year—can be reduced to a 120-second blur without losing any actual information, what does that say about the 60 pages of "achievements" the government spent weeks drafting?

The opposition will keep protesting. The government will keep insisting that Rule 18 was followed to the letter. And the Governor will likely continue to treat his constitutional duties like a chore he’s trying to finish before the timer hits zero.

We’ve optimized our politics for the attention span of a goldfish, and now we’re surprised when the people in charge stop pretending to care about the long-form version. If democracy is being "murdered," as the BJP claims, it’s not happening with a bang or even a whimper. It’s happening with a stopwatch.

If the Governor can summarize the entire state’s agenda in the time it takes to brew a bad cup of coffee, why do we even bother with the other twenty-eight days of the session?