Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s upbeat imagery of spring inevitably following winter and CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat’s reassuring words that his party’s central committee does not want the ongoing ‘crisis’ over the Indo-US nuclear deal to “affect the government”, the prospects of bridging the yawning gap between the ruling UPA and the Left parties that support it ‘from outside’ remain remote. For, the bottom line is the Left’s insistence that the government not put into operation the deal they dislike so intensely. Prannoy Roy, the eminent telecaster, compared this to a man holding a gun on someone’s head, and telling the luckless person, “If you move, I will shoot. But the onus is on you.” To be sure, the central committee meet enables both sides to buy time, if only because neither wants to hasten a mid-term election that must follow the withdrawal of support to the UPA by 59 Left members of the Lok Sabha. But it is difficult to see how this dismal denouement can be avoided unless one side surrenders to the other, at least partially, thus losing both credibility and prestige. To use another imagery rather popular in recent days, the question seems to be not whether the loveless Congress-Left marriage would break down but when. Having said this, one must not forget that Indian politics, like bad Bollywood films, can take utterly unexpected and bizarre twists and turns. However, this does not affect my basic point that the convulsions wracking the UPA because of the underlying incompatibility of the Congress and the communists are entirely in line with the pathetic plight of the preceding cascade of coalitions in this country. Let stark facts speak for themselves. Time was when India was tired of the extraordinarily long single-party dominance of the polity. There was a perceptible yearning for an alternative, and that could only mean that the numerous opposition parties and groups, often resembling a gaggle of squabbling geese, should somehow reinvent themselves as a viable coalition. Ironically, the doors to this tantalising possibility were opened by Indira Gandhi’s Emergency that, in 1977, ended the Congress monopoly on power in New Delhi a full three decades after Independence and brought the Janata Party to power amidst enormous popular goodwill. What followed was both shocking and staggering. The Janata that pretended to be a party but was, in fact, a four-party coalition collapsed ignominiously and incredibly fast under the collective weight of the clashing ambitions and gargantuan egos of its top three leaders. Indira Gandhi was back in power with a two-thirds majority in 33 months flat. (The shenanigans of the far too numerous coalitions in the states are outside the purview of this article.) Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv, ruled the country for nearly a decade thereafter, and during this period the yearning for a non-Congress coalition became even stronger. Among the protagonists of this idea were leaders of small parties and splinter groups as well as political analysts and activists of a certain bent of mind. By giving representation to many big and small groups, they said, the coalitions would better reflect India’s diversities and ensure governance by ‘genuine consensus’. They jumped with joy when the V.P. Singh government was formed, with the support of the two opposite poles of the political spectrum, the BJP and the Left, because his own Janata Dal had just under 150 MPs, compared with 190-odd of the Congress. Though embarrassed by the dissensions within the coalition and by the inevitable clash between VP’s designs and those of the BJP, the cheerleaders of the coalition loftily declared that this was “creative confusion” that would do India “good in the long run”. Lasting only 11 months, all it bequeathed was the Mandir-Mandal strife. The coalition era began full blast in 1996 when the initially minority Congress government, headed by the wily P.V. Narasimha Rao, surprisingly completed its full term of five years but was thrashed in the general election. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who later earned kudos for keeping a motley crowd of 24 coalition partners together for five years, had a bad beginning as prime minister. His first government turned out to be a 13-day wonder, after which the United Front, calling itself the third force, came to power under the leadership of the humble farmer H.D. Deve Gowda, who apparently believed that India was a remote district of Karnataka. Since the UF government could not last a minute without the Congress support, the once grand old party merrily pulled the plug — first on Gowda and then on Inder Kumar Gujral. Atalji formed his second government in March 1998. It collapsed a month after celebrating its first anniversary because the imperious and weighty lady of Tamil Nadu, J. Jayalalithaa, withdrew support on account of the Union government’s inability to withdraw corruption cases against her. These cases were filed, interestingly, by M. Karunanidhi’s government in the state, whose party, the DMK, became a part of the Vajpayee-led coalition that took power after the 1999 elections. (Today, the DMK is part of the UPA.) One minister in the Vajpayee cabinet, who forced the government to ‘roll back’ a series of its decisions, was Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress. Ram Vilas Paswan was also a cabinet minister then, though he resigned after the Gujarat riots in 2002. He, too, is ensconced in the Manmohan Singh cabinet. Today the Congress — a belated convert to the cult of coalitions, having at first ridden the Pachmari high horse of ‘going it alone’ — is trudging the same slippery path that the BJP trod before. To cut a long and painful story short, India, the land of endless paradoxes, is now caught in the worst paradox. As far as one can foresee, coalitions in New Delhi are unavoidable. But, alas, there is no coalition culture to make them durable and effective. Let us at least stop this lofty talk of ‘coalition dharma’. The writer is a political commentator
