Inclusion principles

The prelude to the vote of confidence in Lok Sabha on Tuesday has come as unexpected confirmation of the interesting times we live in. A great deal of attention is focused on the bargains and counter-bargains being struck by smaller, till now marginalised players, like Shibu Soren of the JMM and Ajit Singh of the RLD, and the morality of offers of chief ministerships and cabinet berths. That is perhaps in that nature of a sharply polarised Lok Sabha, where those who can tip the balance acquire inordinate leverage. But as the two poles of today8217;s politics 8212; that is, the two political parties which are expected to retain the numbers to together account for more than half the seats in Lok Sabha 8212; the Congress and the BJP must take more elevated lessons from the current 8220;crisis8221;. Certainly, they do and will continue to find themselves in situations where the need to hold a majority will extract from them big concessions. But at this moment, they also need to understand the costs they pay for their politics of exclusion.

Their political identities will not allow the Congress and the BJP to form a grand coalition in the larger national interest 8212; in fact, the utility of any such coalition to the robustness of our parliamentary democracy is greatly in doubt. But the absolute failure by the two parties to maintain a healthy, if adversarial, contact carries huge costs. On numerous occasions in the past four years the Congress could have reached out to the BJP to carry through its legislative business 8212; for instance, on pension reform. But it was shy of doing so, possibly in fear of overstepping the dark lines of ideological exclusion drawn for it by the Left. Today the Left itself is content to vote on the same side as the BJP in an effort to bring down the Congress-led government. The Congress so diligently bought into the detoxification paradigm that it overlooked the consequences of the Left8217;s repeated ultimatums.

In the Westminster system, bipartisanship in legislative business is traditionally encouraged by the unpredictability of the backbenchers. The stringent anti-defection provisions passed by Parliament itself since 1985 have taken away the fear of the backbench 8212; in fact, political parties have little leeway to open communication with individual members of other parties. It thus falls upon the leaderships of political parties to track overlaps between each other8217;s perceptions of the larger legislative good. No matter what happens on Tuesday, the Congress may well rue its missed opportunities.