India’s electoral alliances

Cost to prop up government will be to surrender large parts of it to Tamilians, either to Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi.

The defeat of the Congress party in next month's elections will also bring the end of the United Progressive Alliance's (UPA) existence. The UPA, just like its rival, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), was a construct rather than an actual coalition of like-minded parties.

Once the government wraps up and the cabinet jobs are handed back, the UPA will dissolve itself rather than remain as a coherent opposition. And most of the people who backed the Congress for being secular or progressive will now back the BJP for being focused on development.

In some ways, the UPA had ceased being 'progressive', the quaint term used to allude to leftism, after the exit of the Communists. They supported the Congress from the outside 10 years ago and were the first to leave the alliance. They said they were pushed out by Manmohan Singh's desire to befriend America through the nuclear deal.

Today, the UPA is only the Congress and its state partners in Maharashtra and Kerala, and little else. And in Maharashtra, it is not really an alliance so much as rival factions of the same party, with one side headed by Sharad Pawar. In Kerala also, the Congress allies with former factions of itself and the Muslim League.

Of all the other parties in the UPA, only the National Conference has three Members of Parliament (MP). The rest are single MP parties. The larger groups holding the government up are all on the outside, including the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party.

Many, many more parties have left the UPA over time than remain with it. Bengal's Trinamul is long gone and so is Bihar's Rashtriya Janata Dal of Lalu Prasad Yadav. They left when the weakness of the government meant they could no longer squeeze it for profit in terms of either personal or political benefit. Such opportunism does not hurt the regional forces and they have become quite shameless in striking up alliances.

This is true especially of the southern parties, such as the DMK, the ADMK and other small caste groups from Tamil Nadu.

The Tamilian parties have become utterly mercenary and no longer make any pretenses of differentiating between the Congress and the BJP. The journalist, Shekhar Gupta, came up with the term ‘ATM ministries’ to define those portfolios, such as telecom, that the Tamilians demand because of their money-making potential.

This will remain true for the next formation as well. If the opinion polls are accurate and the Bharatiya Janata Party is on track to win no more than 200 seats, and in constant need of a few dozen votes, it will be in a similar position as the Congress. The cost to prop up the government will be the surrendering of large parts of it to the Tamilians, whether they are Jayalalitha's MPs or Karunanidhi's. It will also mean giving regional parties a veto on foreign policies that concern their state. The Bengalis made life miserable for Manmohan Singh over his Bangladesh policy and the Tamilians blocked his reaching out to Sri Lanka.

We can observe the temporary and essentially opportunistic nature of India's political alliances on the other side as well. The NDA was put together by the Janata Dal (JD) in Bihar, which exited the alliance last year after Narendra Modi's nomination as prime ministerial candidate. In a way, this exit by the JD signaled the end of the NDA because the only allies remaining with the BJP were those who supported it before the NDA was formed. These are the other communal (I use the word in its traditional rather than accusatory meaning) parties, the Sikhs of the Akali Dal and the Marathis of the Shiv Sena. All the others — and there were a dozen others in the time of Atal Bihari Vajpayee — have left. It was George Fernandes of the Janata Dal, who made the BJP acceptable by aligning with it. It is said that the BJP becomes secular at 180 seats and no doubt that is what will happen this time as well. Some opportunists, like Chandrababu Naidu from Andhra Pradesh and Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan in Bihar, have already returned to the nascent alliance, which may or may not be called the NDA after Modi's victory.

And after the victory comes, Modi will have the same unpleasant task on his hands that more than anything else occupied Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi for the last 10 years.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2014.

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