Dawn of the Coalition Era in Indian Politics

5 Jan, 2018 | RNP Singh, Senior Fellow, VIF

Parliamentary and presidential democracies in modern India can function only with the presence of political parties. Constitutionally, India is a quasi-federal structure with a parliamentary form of government. The heterogeneous nature of Indian society and the complexity of problems, it faced, nurtured a large number of political parties at the national, regional and local level. For over five decades since independence there emerged number of political parties with very little ideological difference. When we take the Indian National Congress as a National Movement in the freedom struggle, we find it representing variety of interests, classes, communities and castes. However, the sole aim of Indian National Congress during the pre-independence days was to achieve freedom for India. As and when the aim was achieved, the Congress transformed itself into a political party to take up challenge of running responsible governments at the Centre as well as States.

India had a period of stable governments at the Centre despite all the social and economic problems, primarily because of certain charismatic leaders Sardar Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Pandit Jawaharlal and Mrs Indira Gandhi who were supported by a galaxy of selfless leaders like Lal Bahadur Shastri, Kamaraj, Chavan and so on. Now such charismatic personalities are small in number but what we have what Churchill calls “men of straw” who are supported by a team of professional politicians.

During the uninterrupted rule of Jawaharlal Nehru, which lasted for about a period of 16 years, the Congress enjoyed monopoly in power both at the Centre and in various States. The charismatic personality of Nehru with his magnetic power to attract people at home and abroad brought India to an enviable position in political circles. The death of Nehru was a shock to the people and Congress Party. The gap created then was, to a certain extent, filled by his daughter Indira Gandhi. But the process of degeneration of the Congress Party started during her tenure and it culminated in the break-up of the party during her time. The disintegration of the Congress Party resulted in the winding up of the one-party dominant system as commonly described, paving the way for the mushroom growth of political parties. The emergence of a multi-party system creating new dimensions to the structure and functions of governments in the Indian polity began.

The framers of our constitution consciously adopted the British model of parliamentary democracy with a cabinet government, with its attendant concept of collective responsibility, as best suited to the conditions of India. Coalition is a direct descendant of the exigencies of a multi-party system in a democratic set up. It is a phenomenon of a multi-party government where a number of minority parties join hands for the purpose of running the government, which is otherwise not possible in a democracy based on a one-party system. A coalition government is framed where many political parties in a house agree to join hands on a common platform by striking their broad differences and form a majority in the house. It is an astonishing chorus of discords.

The term coalition has been derived from the Latin word meaning to go or grow together. Thus, interpreted the term coalition means an act of coalescing or uniting into one body or alliance. It indicates the combination of a number of bodies or parts into one body or whole. In the political sense, the term is used for an alliance or temporary union between various political groups for the exercise or control of political power. Prof Ogg defines it in the Encyclopedia of Social Science as a ‘co-operative arrangement under which distinct political parties or all events members of such parties unite to form a government of ministry’.¹ A coalition is thus an alliance between two or more hitherto separate or even hostile groups or parties formed in order to carry on the governance and share the principle offices of the state.

In a parliamentary democracy, coalitions arise mainly as a result of political compulsion. These might result from racial, communal, religious, economic, social or political conflicts. It may also be formed due to emergency. Policies that are adopted by the coalition government are made by the coalescing parties and merely finalized by the leader of the coalition. In a conflictual coalition game each party opposes every other party and each party seeks its own maximum ministerial advantage.

Since 1989, sets of coalitions and minority governments in New Delhi is an important aspect of the paradigmatic shifts in the Indian political system in terms of political federalization and economic liberalization in the 1990’s. The coalition and minority governments at the Centre appeared after a long spell of Congress dominance until 1989. Although coalition governments at the Centre formally began in 1989 and have continued since, but the Janata Party (1977-79) in power at New Delhi also was a de facto coalition. The decade (1989-99) featured a series of unstable coalitions and minority governments, following each other like a game of musical chair. In India, the coalitions and minority governments are the outcome of the failure of the parliamentary system to satisfy the norms of getting absolute majority of seats in the Lower House (Lok Sabha) to form government. Since 1989, no single party has succeeded in winning comfortable majority in the House except in 2014 Parliamentary Elections when the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) could secure 282 seats. In 2014 elections, BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) claimed a historic victory when it secured 336 seats (including 282 of the BJP.)

The Indian society is moving in the direction of social fragmentation on the basis of identity and sub-identity politics, and multiple political parties for the representation of social identities and segmentary interests of diverse social groups have been established to participate in politics. It is logical that the ongoing process of fragmentation of the society is accelerating the process of fragmentation and multiplication of political parties too. It was not without reason that the BJP-led NDA (1999-2004) had as many 24 constituent parties and groups - with a pure regionalist party like the TDP of Andhra Pradesh extending support to the BJP-led NDA from “outside” - and that the Lok Sabha elections had been contested by forty five parties and groups.

Regional political parties and coalition politics have resulted in the furthering of criminalisation of politics. The problems of persons with criminal records entering electoral politics, and through them into the representative bodies, have received a big boost from the proliferation of regional political parties. The coalition politics have given them a national exposure at the cost of the credibility of the political system. Today, there are several leaders who are playing important roles in the regional and national politics while having some or the other criminal cases pending against them. With the help of regional parties, coalition politics has helped in spreading the malady of political corruption much more comprehensively throughout the Indian political system.² Regional political parties do not give up their parochial approach and therefore are narrow in their outlook. These parties tend to get support through populism. In this system, power shifts from the Centre to States. All regional partners of a coalition have their stronger agendas and there is no national agenda. As a result, the States tend to become strong and the Centre becomes weak.³

The period from 1967 to 1977 witnessed the passage from one-party dominance to a multi-party politics. Several states had moved towards a two-party system, though two-parties vary from state to state. This change, since the 1989 elections, may mark the beginning of a new era in the party system. Political development over the last decade of 20^th Century makes it clear that Indian politics now has a strong lower class thrust. This development, in combination with the increased influence of regional and state-based parties, mirrors a paradigm shift in politics. These parties have increased their vote share to 8-9 per cent of the popular vote. Two factors have contributed to the multiplication of parties: One has been the growing power of regionalism and regional parties; and the other, intensified pursuit of political power rather than disagreement over principle. This explains the fracturing of the Janata Dal in 1999, the formation of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on the eve of the 1999 general election in Maharashtra and splits in the Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in UP in 1998.

Intensification of competitive politics changed the party system from being a rivalry between national parties to that of the regional parties. The nineties have witnessed a succession of minority or coalition governments. The coalition governments were formed in 1989, 1990, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2004-2009) by several political parties. From 1989 to 1999 eight governments were formed. Many small parties have acquired disproportionate influence because the few seats they held were crucial to forming a coalition government. Since 1977, 138 state governments were formed; 40 were coalitions and their average life was not more than 26 months. At the national level, right from 1977 many parties have emerged to form the governments but they were not real coalitions.

Indira period witnessed the emergence of regionally-based parties as an alternative to the national political parties. The 1980’s finally was a testament to the devastation of the Congress party. From early dominance over much of the country, Congress was able to mobilise voters in only three states : Andhra Pradesh, HP and Kerala. In all other states Congress lost support,and their position in Maharashtra, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh got sufficiently weakened. During Nehru’s time Congress dominance was over the entire Indian politics but after him the Congress became the biggest loser in the Hindi belt. Regional parties mainly made their gains at the expense of the Congress.

In the wake of changing political scenario, the multi-party system with the dominance of a single party soon gave way to political plurality. This development was a natural consequence of the diverse Indian population. Awakening of aspirations of regional, linguistic and cultural level, several political and social diversities come to the fore articulating ethnic, caste, religious and the like factors. As a logical corollary, various new political identities come to thrive mainly on regional consciousness.⁴ The regional consciousness differ from state to state and the coalition system is the one and only system that could comfortably accommodate the regional political parties.

Political coalitions, being compulsions of power-sharing and political accommodation need to be seen as emergence of a new level of political consciousness and maturity of Judgment, on the part of the voters. Instead of treating coalitions as a path towards political instability, they have to be seen as a sign of the electorates’ dissatisfaction with the dominant role of one single party leading to dissents, protests and extremism. It is a symbol of the voters’ maturity if they prefer political accommodation and power-sharing on the part of political parties, rejecting rigid postures and unitarian forces. ⁵ Coalition government consisting of two or more political parties to serve the government signifies the fulfilment of these conditions. Indian political parties since coalition era are not yet mature or committed enough to the requirements of parliamentary democracy. Many of state parties are new and adolescent in their behavior. Tolerance, understanding, consultation and compromise for the sake of democracy are totally lacking.

Coalitions have come to stay since 1989 which is obvious as no single party has secured a majority in the Lok Sabha except in 2014 elections when BJP crossed the half mark. In coalition era, the politics of “support from outside” has made the office of the Prime Minister a “lottery”, and this phenomenon has decisively weakened the governance at Centre. Regionalists came to play a very crucial role in the national politics since 1989 by either aligning with any of the two parties like the Congress and the BJP or by making calculations depending on the seats won by any of the two national parties in the Lok Sabha.

References:

1. D. Devanathan, Strengthening Coalition Experiment of Centre : A Few Suggestions, Third Concept, vol. 12, No 143, January 1999, p-26.
2. E. Sudhakar, Coalition Era in Indian Democracy, Third Concept, vol-18, No. 212, October 2004, pp-11-12.
3. Parvathy A.A., Emergence of Coalition System in India : Problems and Prospects, Third Concept, vol. 19, No. 217, March 2005, p-9.
4. Vidya Stokes, Coalition Governments Fault lines in Indian Polity, in Ajay Bhandery (ed), Sanga Sarkar Visasyank, Vidhan Sabha Secretariat, January — June, 2000, p-10.
5. Akhtar Majeed, Coalition Politics and Power Sharing, Manak Publications Pvt. Ltd,
New Delhi, 2000, p-2.
(Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the VIF)

What the AAP Performance means for Indian Politics

Dr M N Buch, 

Dean, Centre for Governance and Political Studies, VIF

The Preamble to the Constitution of India starts with the following words, “We, the people of India …” and ends with the words, “hereby adopt, enact and give to ourselves this Constitution”. The final arbiters of what happens in this country are the people and how they will fulfill their role is given in Chapter 2 of Part IV of the Constitution and Chapter 3 of Part VI of the Constitution, which provide for an elected Parliament at the level of the Union and an elected Legislature at the level of the States. India’s Constitution makes us a representative democracy, that is, every five years we elect persons who will represent us in Parliament and the State Legislatures and who, by their participation in the activities of the Legislature, will enact laws on our behalf, sanction the budget and generally call the Executive into question about its performance. Each one of us cannot sit in Parliament, but through our representatives we can make Parliament listen to us and function according to the larger mandate given by us collectively to our representatives. The value of each M.P. and each MLA is not so much that he occupy a seat in the Legislature, but rather that he represents our collective voices and his ultimate responsibility and accountability is to those who have elected him.

Is that how the representatives view themselves? Do they really believe that they are in office because the people have chosen them and that it is the people who are supreme and that the Members of Parliament and the State Legislatures are only in office because people have decided that they should be there? If the legislators realise that the people are everything and that they themselves exist because the people have put them there, then this would be a true representative democracy. Unfortunately that is not what happens in India because our MPs and MLAs, once they are sworn in, seem to think that they are independent individuals, subject to the party whip but otherwise free to plunder the very people who have put them in office. Every act of corruption on the part of an elected representative, especially if he also holds office as a minister and makes money illegally, makes him doubly accountable, first as a minister to the House, that is, Lok Sabha in the case of the Union under Article 75 (3) or to the State Legislature under Article 164(2). Secondly he is accountable to the people of India, especially his electorate which has sent him to the Legislature as its representative and whom he fails whenever he indulges in a corrupt practice. The people of India have a right to be annoyed with such a legislator because he has violated the mandate given to him by the people. Reverting to the Preamble, the Constitution promises to all its citizens’ social, economic and political justice, liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship, equality of status and opportunity and fraternity which assures the dignity of the individual. Every time a legislator takes a decision or makes a recommendation which is based on such extraneous circumstances as a bribe, he denies both justice and equality to his constituents. Whereas this is an offence under the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption Act, it is much more serious than an ordinary offence because the act violates the Constitution. Deliberately violating the Constitution of India to the detriment of the very people who have framed the Constitution makes the violator more than a criminal, it makes him a traitor. There can be only one penalty for a traitor, which is death and in terms of politics it should metaphorically mean death through writing finis to the political career of the guilty legislator. This power vests only in the people, the voters.

From 1967 when the purchase of power through engineering defections by bribery entered our political scene, the rules of politics changed. Now it became legitimate to try and capture power by means other than the ballot. In other words, the mandate of the people was replaced by the mandate of Kuber. From being representatives of the people, the elected persons became the predators of the people. I use strong words because the extent to which our politics has fallen cannot be expressed politely. To these predators not only were the people prey, they were also the means of somehow achieving the status of predator. Misled at the time of polls, the people were thereafter betrayed once the election had been won. For forty-seven years after 1967 our so called representatives were able to betray the people without the people reacting. That, however, did not mean that anger was not seething internally or that the people any longer had any faith in politicians. Initially the people experimented by sometimes bringing one party into power and sometimes another. In Madhya Pradesh, BJP and Congress alternated accordingly. However, by giving an unclear mandate in many States and at the Centre, the people made it known that they were not happy with any party. Unfortunately the political parties did not read the signals correctly and merrily continued with their unprincipled politics because there in lay a very lucrative source of personal gain. Wherever the people found an alternative they moved away from the dominant Congress Party. New coalitions were formed and changed from time to time and India entered into an era of coalition governments. Unfortunately this has not resulted in better government, less corruption and extension of social services and social infrastructure. Ultimately it seems that the people have had enough and the signal they are sending out is that they are prepared to back anyone or party which promises positive action. The victory of Narendra Modi, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Raman Singh and Vasundhara Raje proves that religion based politics is not what the people favour. Instead the people want performance, are prepared to punish lack of performance and are prepared to vote for anyone who, in their opinion, is likely to provide better government. Ultimately in a democracy if elections reward performance or punish nonperformance, then that is one step forward in the process of democracy. It is an unfortunate fact that our parties, especially the Congress, have preferred manipulation of elections rather than sterling performance. That is why populism has replaced ideology, expediency has replaced programmes and projects and corruption has replaced honest government. Instead there is dependence on old shibboleths such as gareebi hatao, pseudo secularism and a belief that there are vote banks which can be exploited in order to gain and retain power. That is why Congress rode into battle like Don Quixote, mouthing platitudes which became dated forty years ago and only managed a tilt at wind mills rather than a presentation of ideology, ideas and programmes. This gimmickry has not worked. The net result is a drought of votes for the Congress.

It is into this vitiated atmosphere that Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party entered. They represent the collective anger of the people and their message has cut across caste and religious lines. What is more, they broke the traditional vote bank of the Congress, namely, the scheduled castes and the minorities. This time round the traditional vote bank of the Congress voted en masse for Arvind Kejriwal and his group.

In the seventies of the last century, Jayaprakash Narayan launched his ‘Sampoorna Kranti’ (Total Revolution) because the people of India were fed up with corruption, misgovernment and lack of economic opportunities. Because the movement did not define itself in specific terms, nor laid down its specific objectives from which it would not budge, the Sampoorna Kranti fizzled out and in 1980 the same old faces which had declared a State of Emergency came to the forefront. The revolutionary zeal of the Sampoorna Kranti had been dissipated by the infighting, indecisiveness and corruption of the Janata Party Government. That is why the people of India convinced themselves that Indira Gandhi was a better option and in 1980 she was back in power. The attack on institutions, the slide in morality continued and once again the legislators forgot the very people who had sent them to the Legislature. It is in this context that one has to look at the performance of the Aam Aadmi Party to whom, I admit, I had not predicted more than three seats and who in fact emerged as the second largest party in Delhi in the assembly elections. Now the ambitions of Kejriwal have increased and he is eyeing other States and, perhaps the whole country as a means of himself achieving power. The people who have reposed faith in him may find it difficult to work with him because like Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti, the Aam Aadmi Party has still not evolved an ideology, a programme or plan which would make it a continuous and serious contender for political office. Activism is not a substitute for the hard slog in Indian politics. Does this mean that the Aam Aadmi Party will also go the Jayaprakash way?

One achievement of Kejriwal is that he has given a rude shock to the Congress and the BJP in the Delhi assembly elections. Whether his party expands, contracts or disappears will be of no consequence, provided that the shock he has administered to the mainstream parties results in the parties themselves applying suitable correctives and returning to their true role of offering themselves to represent the people, thereafter serving the people instead of preying on them. This would be a positive contribution by Arvind Kejriwal. Otherwise he will be a passing meteor flashing through the sky and then disappear.

I cannot help but look back on the Soviet experiment in Russia after the First World War. In fact, it is in 1905 after the crushing defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese war that Tsarist Russia’s basic weakness came to the fore and there was a revolt which forced the Tsar to concede some powers to the Duma, or Parliament. Unfortunately the situation was beyond gradual reform and when the Russian armed forces broke before the German onslaught, revolution was the only answer. It is from this that the Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin overtook Russia, which signed a separate peace treaty with Germany, thus pulling out of the First World War in its closing stage. Lenin was very clear in his objectives. The Tsarist regime was to be completely dismantled and destroyed and the entire old social order of Russia was to be liquidated, especially the Kulak class of land owners and the Russian aristocracy. A dictatorship of the proletariat was to be established in which at the lowest level the Soviet was the form of both political and administrative organisation. At one level the regime was egalitarian in that it abolished the classes into which Russian society was divided. At another level the regime was extremely totalitarian in which the only arbiters of the fate of Russia and all Russians was the Communist Party. Post Tsarist Russia was not a democracy, there was no rule of law as we understand it and horrors and atrocities were committed in the name of Soviet ideology. Nevertheless Russia’s inexorable march to become the Soviet Union could not be stopped because Lenin and Stalin thereafter had their goals very clearly set before them. To my mind what we had in the Soviet Union was a Sampoorna Kranti, with whose methods and objectives I did not agree but which did pull the Soviet Union out of the Tsarist morass and made it into a truly powerful nation. Where the Soviets went wrong was that they did not gauge or understand how people change when they become more prosperous and that is what ultimately caused the Soviet Union to unravel. Even that is a contribution because it proved that a democracy which is vibrant and open to change is always a better form of government than any dictatorship, which tends to be swallowed up by the very rigidity of its own beliefs.

I make the above point because in Russia there was no direct transition from Tsarist rule to the Soviet Union because for about fourteen years there was the intervening period of an incomplete democratic regime. In India, the danger is that if the political parties continue to bicker, are effete, practice unconstitutional means, are corrupt and fail to give good government, then the likelihood is that the rot in the political system will continue. To the extent that Kejriwal and his followers have been able to project the collective anger of the people and the refusal to accept the old rotten system, this is a very positive thing in Indian politics. The question is whether our other mainstream political parties will read the signal, stop finding excuses for defeat and instead do some introspection so that the government envisaged by the Preamble is in fact established because the message of the Constitution is understood by the politicians and the political parties. The message is good government, strong but totally accountable, firm but honest and at all times in touch with ground realities and the aspirations of the people. I will be very surprised if the Aam Aadmi Party is able to convert itself into a true political party, but to the extent that it is a sounding board for what people are thinking that should be welcomed by all political parties. Ultimately we all Indians need to have a mirror held up to us so that we can see ourselves as others see us. Jayaprakash Narayan could have done it but he faltered and instead gifted us with a bunch of some of the most rapacious politicians. Will Kejriwal be up to it? That depends upon the extent of megalomania that descends on him as the paeans of praise engulf him. Will his feet then remain planted firmly on the ground? Unfortunately his present stance of making impossible demands and refusal to concede that there might be another point of view would suggest otherwise.