Whither General Elections 2009?

The expectations about the outcome of the forth-coming general elections are shrouded in a penumbra of uncertainty. No single political party or group of parties or political combinations is expected to win an absolute majority, leaving the doors open to post-election negotiations and messy compro-mises resulting in an unstable government of the sort the country experienced during 1996-98.

This uncertainty is the result of political fragmentation which has manifested itself in the form of weakening of the national parties and the emergence of regional parties. The decline of the Congress started in 1967 when, for the first time, regional parties or groupings managed to challenge the hitherto unchallenged supremacy of the Congress both at the Centre and in the States and succeeded in unseating the Congress governments in major States like Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. After the Emergency and as a result of excesses during the period, the Congress lost power at the Centre as well as in the States in 1977. Three years later the Congress managed to torpedo the Janata Government at the Centre which could not complete its tenure and came back to power under a much subdued Indira Gandhi. Following her tragic assassination in 1984, the Congress chose to install her son Rajiv Gandhi. Such was the wave of sympathy for him that in the general elections in 1984, he came to power with an unprecedented majority. But the Bofors scandal was his undoing and he lost the moral authority to rule. In the elections that followed the Congress could not get a majority and allowed a still smaller party of V.P. Singh to assume power, with outside support of the BJP, which emerged as an alternative political party at the national level, as also the Leftist parties. However, on issue of arrest of L.K. Advani in Bihar to stop his rath yatra the BJP withdrew its support and V.P. Singh, who could not get the parliamentary vote of confidence, resigned. The disgruntled Chandrashekhar saw his opportunity and formed a government. He had an insignificant number of MPs supporting him but the Congress provided the oxygen. When the Congress withdrew support on the flimsy ground of police watch on Rajiv Gandhi, Chandrashekhar resigned. Fresh elections had to take place.

Again no party could gain an absolute majority. P.V. Narasimha Rao of the Congress formed a minority government and had to bribe the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha MPs to remain in power for five years. In the general elections of 1996, the Congress lost more seats. Thus the political position at the Centre became quite precarious. The minority government gave way during 1996-98 to coalition governments formed by an assortment of regional parties, leaving the national parties—the Congress and BJP—out of power till in the 1998 general elections the BJP, under the leadership of Atal Behari Vajpayee and with the participation of 24 regional parties, was able to form a coalition government of the National Democratic Alliance. It proved stable and completed its full term—the first coalition government to do so. However, on the eve of the next general elections, the coalition distinctly weakened with regional parties like the DMK choosing to part ways.

In the 2004 general elections, despite the “Shining India” slogan or perhaps because of it, the NDA came a cropper with the BJP trailing the Congress by a few seats. It was now the turn of the Congress to form a coalition government which it did under the umbrella of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) headed by Dr Manmohan Singh though Congress chief Sonia Gandhi remained at the helm of the alliance. The government had the outside support of the Leftist parties without whom it could not have mustered a majority. The Leftist parties vehemently opposed the economic reforms programme of the Manmohan Singh Government as also its nuclear energy agreement with the US. The Prime Minister was bent on seeing it through. When the critical moment came, the Leftist parties parted company. But the determined Prime Minister managed to get the vote of confidence by wooing the Samajwadi Party and getting the additional support of MPs in jail on conviction in criminal cases as also deserters from other parties including the BJP. The display of a bundle of notes to bribe MPs created a scandal but the Prime Minister got what he wanted—a parliamentary majority to authenticate his action to sign agreements with the International Atomic Energy Commission, the US Government and members of the NSG. When the Election Commission announced the 2009 elections, the Congress grandly declared that it would go ahead alone at the national level with alliances with the regional parties only at the State level. The rationale was that these regional parties have no agenda on national issues and do not possess any national perspective. Sharad Pawar of the NCP repeatedly urged the Congress to fight the elections in the name of the UPA but the Congress had other ideas and was in no mood to listen. The Congress had blindly anticipated that it would continue to get support from the regional parties but history repeated itself. The regional parties started deserting the national party as they did to the BJP in 2004. The RJP headed by Laloo Prasad and Lok Janashakti headed by Ramvilas Paswan unilaterally announced an agreement on seat sharing regarding 37 seats in Bihar leaving only three seats for the Congress. When the Congress retaliated by announcing its candidates for 37 seats, Laloo announced his candidates for the remaining three seats as well. In UP, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had come to the rescue of Manmohan Singh when the Left parties had deserted him, left only nine seats for the Congress, retaining all the remaining 71 seats for his own Samajwadi Party. The regional satraps want ahead and forged an alliance all over UP-Bihar declaring that they will not fight with each other but work for each other. The Congress tried to put up a brave face arguing that the regional parties have not left the UPA but the isolation of the Congress was apparent.

In the south, the PMK, a regional party of Tamil Nadu, decided to part company with the DMK and join hands with Jayalalitha, the AIADMK supremo. Following this decision, the Ministers of the PMK in the Union Government also resigned. To compensate for these losses, the Congress was able to retain its alliance with the NCP in Maharashtra and forge a new alliance with the Trinamul Congress in West Bengal, though it had to concede two-to-three seats to the Trinamul in West Bengal, and yield one more to the NCP in Maharashtra.

The predicament in which the Congress party finds itself is of its own making. Its unchallenged leader Indira Gandhi, unsure of her own position and suspicious of any potential upcoming politician, decided to make State leaders completely subservient to her and her family. The slightest show of defiance would mean liquidation. The Chief Ministers become her nominees and puppets. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, even before he became the Prime Minister, felt free to openly humiliate a senior leader of Andhra Pradesh like Anjaiah. The absence of the confident leadership of the Congress party in the State created a vacuum there and was filled by a regional leader like N.T. Rama Rao. The weakening of the State level leadership of the Congress, following concentration of all political power in the so-called Congress High Command, paved the way for powerful non-Congress State leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Laloo Prasad to emerge.

The Opposition NDA had also to bear a similar fate. Navin Patnaik of the BJD, a long-term ally, suddenly declared that he was parting company with the BJP and would go it alone. He was considered a long-term, dependable ally and the blow was severe. Though the desertion was on the ground of differences regarding seat-sharing, observers attributed it to attacks on the churches which were blamed on the Bajrang Dal. The BJP was shocked by the BJD’s desertion but tried to get some compensatory gain by bringing back to the NDA fold the AGP in Assam, Harayana Vikas Party of Chautala and Ajit Singh’s Lok Dal in western Uttar Pradesh.

All these political developments go to show the growing confidence of the regional parties and the threat they pose to the national parties. The national parties found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. The alliance with the regional parties no doubt helped them to cobble up an alliance to get a majority in Parliament. But by the same token, the dependence on the regional parties meant that their own growth as a national party was thwarted.

While the alliances of the ‘national parties’ were disintegrating, the Left parties took the lead in forming a new non-Congress non-BJP alliance. In addition to all the Left parties, regional parties like the Telugu Desam led by Chandrababu Naidu and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti in Andhra Pradesh joined it. The Left leaders tried to lure other regional parties like Jayalalitha’s AIADMK, Mayawati’s BSP and Navin Patnaik’s BJD recently broken from the NDA, but they held back. Mayawati hosted a dinner for the Third Front leaders where Prakash Karat read out its manifesto for Mayawati’s enlightenment. But Mayawati could not be contained in the Third Front. Her ambitions were bigger. She wanted to establish her party on its own as a national party and to emerge as India’s next Prime Minister.

In the areas dominated by the regional parties, the growth of the Congress was stunted. That is why it took a calculated risk to fight the national elections on its own. To what extent this gamble will pay off, only the results of the general elections will show. But the Congress party is focused not just on the outcome of the forthcoming general elections but its enduring growth as a national party. For the BJP, the dilemma is even more acute. While it has managed to rule a larger number of States than the Congress, the precondition for emergence as a national party, namely, presence in all States, is difficult for it to fulfil as it has little presence in States like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal.

But this is not just a question of relative strengths of the national parties and the regional parties in Parliament. The basic question is: what happens to the Government of India if the regional parties get the better of the national parties? If they do, they may even marginalise the national parties relegating them to the status of competing regional players. Does this augur well for the future Government of India?

There is a tendency in some quarters to argue that this is not a matter to worry about. The regional parties are as much concerned about the nation as the so-called national parties. The nation consists of States and regional parties, close to their own regions, are much better aware of the needs of the people. But this is not a quite sound argument. The nation is not just an aggregation of States. In the very nature of the case, the nation transcends the States. Pursuit of the national goals requires a national outlook. When that is lost, the results would be quite disastrous. We have any number of examples to demonstrate this. The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena outfit of Raj Thakre wants to stop the entry by force of the north Indians, no mater what the Constitution says. Pawar, the Nationalist Congress head, wants the post of the Prime Minister filled up by rotation. The Shiv Sena ditched the NDA candidate for the Presidency to support a Maharashtrian for the post of the President. Karunanidhi wants the Government of India to send the Indian Army to Sri Lanka to protect the Tamils. Every State wants to claim larger share of river water resources for themselves in disregard of the claims of other States. What position would they take as members of the Central Government? Subjects like defence, foreign policy, highways and communication are in the Central domain. Ministers of the regional parties in the Union Government represent State interests. They do not represent national interest as a whole. The Ministers in the Union Government should be answerable to the Prime Minister, not the local heads of the parties to which they belong. Dominance of State satraps has been accompanied by virtual absence of national leaders who can hold the nation together. The strength, coherence and sense of direction of the Union Government will be in jeopardy in the event of the regional parties getting the better of the national parties to such an extent that the Union Government would not be built round the central pivot of a national party. Things will get “out of joint and the Centre would not hold”.

This precarious political situation would be dangerous at a time when a strong, cohesive Central Government is needed to deal with determination grave problems facing the nation—such as recession, layoff and unemployment, inadequate infrastructure, corruption in government, financial layoff, scandals in business, turbulence in the neighbouring countries, cross-border infiltration, terrorism and insurgency, the Naxalite challenge, problems of ‘slumdogs’ in urban areas and of farmers’ suicides in rural areas, growing criminalisation, and threats of climate change, pollution and consequent environmental hazards.

Dr P.R. Dubhashi is the former Vice-Chancellor, Goa University, and an erstwhile Secretary, Government of India. He can be contacted at e-mail: dubhashi@giaspn01.vsnl.net.in