CHENNAI, DECEMBER 8: There was no decline in industrial development or economic growth in general in the last 10 years though successive coalition governments at the Centre proved to be unstable, speakers at a seminar on ``Making a success of coalitions'' observed on Tuesday.The seminar was jointly organised at the Indian Institute of Technology by the Satyamurthy Centre for Democratic Studies, Madras Management Association and Konrad Adenauer Foundation on Tuesday.Participating in the session on national experience in coalitions, political analyst Pran Chopra said in fact the progress witnessed in the last 15 years was comparatively more than in the earlier years.The basic characteristic of the coalitions in recent years, including the present BJP-led Government at the Centre, was that the political parties had moved to ``the middle of the road,'' he said, pointing at the broad consensus built on diverse political and economic issues.The kind of single party hegemony which the Congress held during the first three decades of Independence would not be available to any single party in the foreseeable future. Even the largest single party would need partners in order to form a government, he said.Asserting that such phenomenon was good for the federal system, he said in the process democracy was acquiring a wider base with the federation strengthened by horizontal and vertical linkages even as political parties at different levels joined hands at the apex to form the Union Government.On why the second Vajpayee Government fell earlier this year, he said the BJP was too hasty and rather indiscriminate in wooing partners. Moreover the BJP did not bother to reduce the ideological divide between itself and its partners.The present Government headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee was the best so far as a coalition, Chopra said, adding that besides a majority on its own in the legislature, the vote and seat share of its constituents in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections was better than that of the partners in any earlier coalition, excepting the one formed in 1977.The causes of political stability were products of the increasingly rapid shifts in society which went beyond party politics and into the domain of social change, he observed.Columnist Rajmohan Gandhi and Prof Ajay K Mehra of Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, New Delhi, participated in the discussion and Prof S Swaminathan, business editor of The Hindu, chaired the session.
