HVK Archives: Back to the future
Back to the future - The Indian Express
Editorial
()
11 October 1996
Title : Back to the future
Times to make the most of coalition politics
Author : Editorial
Publication : The Indian Express
Date : October 11, 1996
Since the electorate, like the consumer, is always right,
the political parties will have to see the UP results not
in terms of individual gains and losses but in much
broader terms than they are accustomed to. What is more,
they will have to consider this particular verdict in the
country's largest, most populous and politically still a
crucial State along with the outcome of the Lok Sabha
election. In both cases, the message is unambiguous; the
voters have not reposed their faith in any single party.
They may not have done so deliberately. In fact, each
individual voter or each vote bank - to use an unfor-
tunate, but popular shorthand - obviously wanted a
particular party to come to power. But the collective
outcome, which should have a sobering effect on all, is
that none of the parties has enough of a support base to
make it on its own - either to the Lok Sabha or to the UP
Vidhan Sabha. So all their rhetoric and posturing and
personal and political feuds and frantic wooing of the
voters have come to nought. The electorate has simply
not found the parties to be good enough.
It is possible that the country is entering a new phase
in politics when old, stratified ways of looking at
governance have to be discarded. When politicians and
the electorate expect a single party to attain majority,
they want to emulate and endlessly repeat the Congress's
feat of securing a majority at the Centre and in many of
the States at one time without appreciating that the
latter's success was an accident of history.
As the party of Indian independence, the Congress was
allowed a generous grace period for its past services.
But it had to end. And now coalitions seem the only way
out. At one stage, the BJP had convinced itself that it
was the natural successor to the Congress, but both the
Lok Sabha and the UP results have exposed its limita-
tions. It, too, will have to opt for coalitions if it
wants to taste power.
The experience of the first two Janata Governments and
the shakiness of the Deve Gowda administration may induce
wariness as well as scepticism about coalitions. But
since there is evidently no escape from them, it is
perhaps worthwhile to focus on their positive features.
The most obvious is that such an arrangement compels a
party to smoothen its rough edges. The BJP, for in-
stance, had offered to freeze some of the contentious
points on its agenda when it was searching for allies at
the Centre. Similarly, in UP, both the SP and the BSP
will probably realise that unless their leaders and
supporters learn the art of peaceful coexistence, power
will forever elude them. This is the lesson which the
Leftists and the Congress have learnt in Kerala and West
Bengal, with the former abandoning their earlier interne-
cine wars. If, to attain power, compromises become
unavoidable, the current aggressive tendency to espouse
the cause of specific support bases may give way to a
more mature all-inclusive approach. That would be a gain
for the polity.
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