The monolith cracks — A culture of coalition must emerge

Comparison tends to be odious. The uninhibited expression of disgust and helplessness by Prime Minister I.K. Gujral is in jarring contrast to the note of confident optimism Jawaharlal Nehru struck in his tryst with destiny’ speech this day 50 years ago. Heading a gigantic Congress party, Nehru was then at the pinnacle of power. Gujral, in comparison, cannot even control his fragmented Janata Dal, let alone the motley crowd in the United Front whose government he heads. Nehru could conveniently talk out or haughtily ignore the Opposition and set his own political and social agenda for the country. Gujral stutters and fumes helplessly as the power brokers in his own ruling combine embarrass him on every conceivable issue. No one can reasonably expect 1997 to be what 1947 was. The fact that the country’s chief political executive today finds himself almost unable to take the nation forward is, however, significant. In her fifty years of Independence, India may have had the satisfaction of being among the few former colonies to have successfully maintained democratic government. But during the same period, the institutions and procedures of governance it had partially inherited from the British have been severely bruised.

India’s political parties today are, perhaps, the most vulnerable of its institutions. As the Congress party, which ruled the nation single-handed till 1977 — barring a few states where non-Congress regimes got entrenched after 1967 — continues to decay, no other national party has emerged to fill the vacuum. The Congress today is not even the single largest party in the Lok Sabha. It lost Tamil Nadu in 1967, West Bengal in 1977, and Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the late eighties — seemingly irretrievably. It suffers not only from a complete erosion of its support base but also stands de-institutionalised. The bluster of Sitaram Kesri and Jitendra Prasad notwithstanding — they insist that the Congress is poised to rule the country single-handedly once again and that too within a year — the party is desperately looking for friends among the same petty, localised parties it had dismissed disdainfully as unprincipled till the other day. The BJP, which has emerged as the party-in-waiting, is constrained by the self-imposed limits of its exclusivist ideology and its reach is confined to the cow belt barring some pockets in Karnataka. The communist parties have failed to extend their base out of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. Smaller parties centred on issues related to ethnicity, regionalism, caste or religion are in no position to throw up a viable left-of-centre alternative to the Congress and the BJP.

Unfortunately, the major parties are yet to accept the reality that the days of single-party dominance are over. Playing for short-term gains, the smaller parties are busy trying to upstage one another. If coalitions have succeeded in states like Kerala and West Bengal, it is because the partners there realised that none of them could grab power on its own. For coalitions to succeed at the Centre, a similar culture will have to be evolved at the national level. Until then, India will have to tolerate a dysfunctional polity.