It8217;s Party Time, Folks

A book on coalitions was waiting to be written in India. Since the last decade and more, specifically since 1989, after which no single part...

A book on coalitions was waiting to be written in India. Since the last decade and more, specifically since 1989, after which no single party has been able to win a majority in Lok Sabha, we have had a succession of power sharing arrangements at the Centre. 1989 it was when it began to sink in that the non-Congress government would be more than merely the anti-Congress huddle. Indian politics was being reconfigured. Since then, the rules of the political game have changed. One party dominance, moderate levels of political participation and elite consensus have given way to political fragmentation and multi-party competition. At the political centre, coalition politics has arrived to stay.

Yet public discussion on coalitions remains glaringly out of date. There is far too much handwringing over questions of survival and stability. There is far too little sustained tracking of the phenomenon of power sharing. What can be the types of pacts between political parties? Which is, what must be, key: ideological affinity or maximisation of pay-offs? What are the conditions in which particular groups are able to push their agendas and influence policy outcomes? What insights, wisdom, does comparative experience in other countries offer us? We need a book that helps us catch up with the ground realities at the very least. And bring some conceptual order to bear on them.

This could have been that book. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Shankar Raghuraman8217;s work is mainly hobbled by its own lack of ambition. For the most part, it is content to meticulously catalogue events in the lives of the main dramatis personae 8212; the BJP, Congress, regional parties and parties of the left. There are insights, en route, into the politics of coalition. But these lengthy narratives constantly threaten to break free from the book8217;s central concern and go their own separate ways. And they spend far too much time mapping recent events that are yet to fade.

The book8217;s argument is laid out in the beginning and it is there once again towards the end: the process of fragmentation of the Indian polity is not yet over, write Guha Thakurta and Raghuraman, both senior journalists, on the eve of Verdict 2004, and the churning is unlikely to firm up into a neat bi-polar arrangement with the BJP holding up one end and the Congress the other. Smaller parties of the Third Force will continue to demand a separate reckoning. And this is no nightmarish scenario. Coalitions do not produce inherently unstable governments. Or governments that must perform badly. Single party governments are as riven by faultlines and prevarications, and they have been, especially on economic policy. Coalitions, in fact, deepen federal democracy. They are more likely to be responsive to the aspirations of smaller social and ethnic groups that felt excluded from processes of development.

The problem is not just that the narrative spills well over and around these assertions. It is also that coalition politics itself has raced ahead and thrown up another, yet different, set of questions.

If coalition governments are necessary and desirable to give representation to newly assertive social forces, why is it that these forces have still not been able to leave their impress upon policy? Why is it that they are still unable to mould the agenda of high politics to their needs? Why do policies of the BJP-led front and the Congress-led front look and mean the same? Why does dissent or debate in these arrangements still stem from within the Big Two, not their respective bands of allies? What ails coalition politics in India, that even while it seems to make the negotiations more participatory, it also makes outcomes less radical?

A Time of Coalitions calls for an epilogue. And even a sequel.