Burden of the Allies

The history of coalition politics has lessons for everyone—the NDA, the INDIA bloc, and especially the BJP and the Congress

- Aditya Nigam

AS the new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government gets ready to take office, this might be an opportune moment to take a look at Indian democracy’s experience with coalition governments, which one might argue, are the only possible form compatible with Indian politics. After all, rarely in its history, over centuries, has India ever had one centralised power rule over it without having to adjust with regional satraps who remained crucial elements in the power structure.

Sometime around the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, Indian democracy entered what has been called the ‘era of coalitions’, saying goodbye to what political scientists described as the ‘one-party dominant system’, or the ‘Congress system’, to use Rajni Kothari’s expression. Since then, there have been several phases of coalition governments but the fundamental feature of a coalition involving RSS-linked parties is the control this organisation tries to wield over the entire coalition, as we will see.

Among the earliest expressions of this coming change was the emergence of the National Front (NF) government led by V P Singh of the Janata Dal that took office in November 1989. The NF, comprising parties like the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), among others, formed the government at the Centre, interestingly, with the support of the Left on the one hand and the BJP on the other. This circumstance itself was an index of the way things were to change irreversibly in the coming decade. For the rapid dwindling of the space once occupied by the Congress was a consequence of the unravelling of the ‘rainbow coalition’ that the party itself had been, where all caste, regional and community groups, indeed all kinds of class interests as well, had found a place within it till about the end of the 1960s.