Three days before counting day this May, high on exit poll readings, BJP’s Arun Jaitley had tweeted: “The arithmetic of caste coalitions loses to the chemistry on the ground & voters don’t elect hung Parliament where ugly and untenable coalitions have a role to play.(sic)”
“Chemistry” is a favourite political metaphor of Mr Jaitley’s, but who can fault him on the prediction? On his first post-poll visit to his own Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi echoed the idea: “Political analysts will have to accept that beyond poll arithmetic, there is chemistry.”
So it was in Karnataka too, with the BJP getting 25 seats and over 50 per cent of the vote in the LS polls, restricting the ruling coalition partners, Congress and JDS, to just one seat each.
In the 2018 Assembly polls, Congress and JDS, contesting separately, everywhere in the state, and mainly against each other in many constituencies, had still managed together to poll 57 per cent of the vote. So, how did it all fall apart and in just one year, even though it was a coalition that came to the contest, a coalition which was still newly in power?
The answer: bad chemistry. The partners detest each other — at the top, through the ranks and, granularly, among the electorate. The top leadership in both parties had invested heavily in hardening social divisions along caste, communal and sub-regional lines. So, what the coalition obtained was not addition, but attrition.
It first came apart with the unravelling of these social divisions. One in two voters backed Modi’s BJP in Karnataka. It defied all caste calculations. It did not even mean new caste or communal consolidations, because in the local body polls, held recently, BJP finished behind the Congress and JDS. So, where the issues are local and not dictated at the state level, the state BJP flounders.
The problem is not with the idea of coalition government. It is with this particular one.
The attrition on the ground has been exacerbated by the nauseating gamesmanship at the top. News nuggets leaked to the media from the coalition’s multiple power centres - Deve Gowda camp, Siddaramaiah camp, dissident groups or powerful operators like DK Shivakumar — keep undermining the coalition government led by HD Kumaraswamy, breeding distrust, resentment and indiscipline. To the public, it seems clear that these top leaders cannot work together.
Whether there is some truth in the allegations or not, it is widely believed that Siddaramaiah conspired to see Deve Gowda suffer a humiliating defeat in Tumkur, that Congress workers helped independent candidate Sumalatha defeat Kumaraswamy’s son Nikhil with the secret support of the Congress leadership. Deve Gowda himself has often fed these suspicions through veiled remarks to the media.
So, if this government falls, now or in some time, it will not only be because of the BJP’s machinations but also because of the coalition’s internal conflicts and contradictions.
And even if the state goes to midterm polls, the BJP may be surprised by the results: the mandate may not be against Congress or the JDS. It would be a rejection of their untenable union.
India’s has accepted the idea of post-poll coalitions since 1989. We have seen full and stable terms by governments comprising 30 or more parties.
As the idea matures, it becomes inevitable that parties begin to think of pre-poll understandings, if not at the electoral level, then at the level of governance, when a post-poll arrangement obtains — a common agenda of governance.It seems the voters are getting tired of identity politics.
Prakash Belawadi
(The author is a film, television and media personality, an activist and a journalist from Bengaluru)