Can India be governed as a democracy? Even a hanging such as this was only ever going to concentrate minds for a day. India's surprise execution on Wednesday of Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, the Pakistani gunman captured during the Mumbai terror attack four years ago, enraptured India and wholly overshadowed an opposition rally against the government. On Thursday, however, it was back to business as usual in Indian politics. Members of parliament - both opponents and supporters of the Congress-led coalition - shouted their protests at the government's economic reform agenda, noisily aired parochial grievances and caused chaos at the opening of the winter session of parliament, forcing repeated adjournments. Nothing was achieved. India's first use of the death penalty in eight years, in other words, had merely postponed for 24 hours the need to answer the question that haunts foreign investors and much of the Indian middle class: can the country be governed effectively and remain the world's biggest democracy? The Indian state has declined into a state of paralysis. Governance has become a serious problem and corruption is pervasive," writes Gurcharan Das, former chief executive of Procter & Gamble India, in his book India Grows at Night. The point about the night is that the government is asleep. India has law and China has order, but a successful nation needs both. It can legitimately be asked whether India even has the necessary laws. The inability of Manmohan Singh's government to enact essential legislation is a grave concern for businesses awaiting clarity on everything from land acquisition and taxes to foreign investment and competition policy. The previous, "monsoon" session of parliament was so disrupted by the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) that Mr Singh complained of a "negation of democracy." Nomura analysts have labelled that sitting a "washout" and lament the risk that the winter session could go the same way. As Jagdish Bhagwati, the veteran, pro-reform economist, put it in New Delhi this week: "The unhappiness which our investors have is just boiling over with the lack of progress." The main reason for the present logjam in Indian lawmaking is the BJP's desire to push the Congress party out of power by stripping it of its allies and forcing an early general election, still 18 months away in the normal course of events. To achieve this, the BJP is trying - somewhat unconvincingly, given its own record of liberal economic reforms - to stoke public outrage over the permission granted to foreign investors since September to own 51 per cent stakes in supermarkets and department stores in those states where the authorities agree. For those who seek to govern India's 1.2bn people, a more fundamental problem than the rivalry between Congress and the BJP is the change in the balance of power between the centre and the states since independence in 1947. Congress dominated Indian politics from the start - under Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, and then under his descendants - but was eventually matched and temporarily overtaken by the BJP. But instead of developing a stable two-party system, India has witnessed the rapid growth of regional parties, whose populist leaders wrest financial and political concessions from reluctant BJP or Congress prime ministers in exchange for supporting whatever unwieldy coalition they are running at the time. Uttar Pradesh may be poor, but it elects 80 of the 545 MPs in the lower house and the parties that succeed there wield national power as well. Indians muse on the possibility of a future national prime minister from one of the regional parties, leading a "third front" government that would include neither Congress nor the BJP. It is admirable that no one can say with confidence who might be the next prime minister. Wrangling in public is more defensible than the secretive process by which the Chinese Communist party has just chosen the country's new leaders. India's complicated political struggle also makes good television. But the stormy and unproductive opening of parliament in New Delhi on Thursday suggests it is not the ideal way to make good laws or policies.