The Chinese torture continues as the last results filter in. But there is one clear difference this time around. There should not be any confusion as to who the President should invite to form the government first. The most consistent feature of yet another fractured verdict is a marked popular preference for a BJP-led coalition and that, even in terms of personal charisma, the predominant national choice is Atal Behari Vajpayee. This is no occasion for constitutionalist hair-splitting. Common sense would dictate this as the only course - any other would leave the President open to the charge of partisanship.Many would still complain that a confused voter has given us yet another incomplete verdict. But it is time we found a more creative approach to assessing this split verdict, the third out of the last four. What this "consistency" in apparent indecision shows that in post-Mandal India coalitions have come to stay. That the voter is reflecting a more federal approach by giving clear verdicts in eachstate. The result is that a rainbow coalition - irrespective of which colour dominates it - is what he would prefer and it is time our politicians acquired the maturity and sagacity to live with such politics. After two shameful failures it is the Indian leaders' third chance to prove equal to this task. This is Vajpayee's real challenge as well.He knows as well as anybody else that this is not a vote so much for the BJP's hard, original ideology as for the good sense, political skills and instinct of its think-tank as well as the motivated hard work of its cadres. If it was indeed an unequivocal verdict for the distinctive BJP ideology it would not have been saddled with nearly 80 MPs from disparate allies and yet be searching for the last twenty. The lessons of this verdict are no different for the BJP than for the losers: that politics of electoral alliances and coalitions is here to stay and the party that adapts to this better will come out on the top. That is where the BJP has aced all its rivals,including such past grandmasters of the craft as Harkishen Singh Surjeet and Sitaram Kesri.There is also a reaffirmation of the fact that the regional parties are the more resilient feature of our politics. How else do you explain the fact that only two parties to have defied the anti-incumbency sentiment are regional parties at two extremities of the country - the Akali Dal and the TDP? Strong regional parties would make coalitions inevitable. The challenge for our politicians is to build them around a healthy, workable consensus. This would necessitate putting old party and ideological agendas on the back burner. The Left did this half-heartedly with the United Front. Now the BJP has to pass the same test. The voter has therefore already enforced moderation on the non-secular aspects of the BJP's politics, indicating that he is wiser than we think. Note how careful he has been even in a state like Haryana which first gave us the politics of defection, bribery and horse-trading. Fed up with Bansi Lal'sconfused self-righteousness, he has given even Devi Lal's nearly non-existent party a resounding success but has at the same time snuffed out the patriarch's dynastic notions by defeating him as well as his grandson. Again, if the Sena-BJP alliance has got such a drubbing it is the Maharashtrian voter's way of saying he is far too sophisticated to put up with foul-mouthed ruffians for ever.That is why he won"t take kindly to the grand hypocrisy of the Grand New Secular Alliance being cobbled together by the Congress and the United Front. Secularism, indeed, is a strong enough cause for parties to bury all other differences to counter a communal threat. But no such sentiment was evident when Kesri put personal insecurities above secularism to pull down H D Deve Gowda. Or when the unholy "Jain Gang" of Arjun Singh, Jitendra Prasada, N D Tiwari and others dumped I K Gujral, blinded by the delusion that a hurt Sonia Gandhi would join the campaign all guns blazing and hand over power to them on a platter. Orwhen the same Surjeet, the Left and even the Janata Dal, so supremely arrogant, kept the Congress out of the coalition, as if they were more untouchable than even the BJP. If they now sound so hollow as to be giving secularism a bad name they only have themselves to blame.But in a tie-breaker election, if they were to succeed in putting together yet another coalition the responsibility on their unworthy shoulders would be immense. If it does reduce this also to yet another cynical mess, it would finish the secular cause for ever. Today, the voter has defanged the communal forces by offering them power with such equivocation and actively putting the BJP on notice by punishing it in all the states it rules. He will be watching closely as the party changes and evolves to pass this new test. Another UF-type misadventure would undo all that.
