In the double ball roulette that is Indian politics, ideology and iniquity must fall on the same slot to determine the winner. In the age when ideology has lost both relevance and respectability, parties have become flexible to fit the contours of power politics. Maximum Marx is generating minimum returns for Marxists. Secularism is an inaudible slogan in the cacophony of greedy ambition. Even the polarisation between nationalism and liberalism is developing cracks. Maharashtra’s mavericks demonstrated that only power can unite conflicting ideologies and egos. Impossibility was the only possibility.
Shiv Sena, the pioneer of hard Hindutva, nullified its 30-year-old partnership with BJP and agreed to befriend anyone willing to support its chief ministership of India’s richest state. Uddhav Thackeray wooed Sonia Gandhi for favours in futile hope. He had deemed it humiliating to powwow with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. The long-standing political marriage between two compatible ideologies proved to be just a live-in relationship between statecraft spouses.
Alliances and divorces are common in India’s electoral marriage bureaus. In 1977, ideologically inimical parties combined to defeat Indira Gandhi to save democracy. The RSS-backed Jan Sangh dissolved its identity in a broader Janata Dal pool into which champion Congressmen like Morarji Desai, Chandra Shekhar and Jagjivan Ram dived in with power-fuelled alacrity. The CPM extended support to the Morarji government which was economically right-wing and politically pragmatic. Inbuilt ideological contradictions ensured the Janata Dal’s collapse. All of a sudden, socialists smelt saffron under every bed and wanted an RSS purge.
As the Janata empire crumbled, Home Minister Charan Singh who sent Indira to jail decided that Congress is a better bedfellow than the party of which he was a founder. The chaos that ensued was a naked display of rank opportunism and demolition of ideological silos. Charan Singh became the PM with Indira’s support. Next, the Marxists dumped Morarji. Four months later, hating the idea of another coalition emerging as an alternative, Indira withdrew support and returned to power with a two-thirds majority. For the next nine years, the Gandhis dominated national polity. But Rajiv Gandhi’s poor political skills disenchanted prominent ministers like V P Singh, Arun Nehru and Arif Mohammed Khan, who left to float their own outfits. Coalitions of convenience, not conviction, were revived in the decades that followed.
1989: V P Singh heads India’s first multi-party government. It is an ideological goulash made with regional spices like the TDP, DMK and AGP and outside garnish from the Left and BJP. It doesn’t survive a year; Rajiv Gandhi exploits Chandra Shekhar’s ambition for the catbird seat, which leads him to walk away from the Janata Dal. Ardent Congress baiters like Biju Patnaik, Devi Lal and George Fernandez ditch V P Singh and accept the Congress crutch. Chandra Shekhar lasts less than five months. The election that follows and concludes after Rajiv’s assassination puts P V Narasimha Rao’s minority government in power for the next five years. An infirm Congress flails in dusty defeat during the next poll.
1996: The Congress is weakened by Rao’s lack of cadre support and India gets its first hung Parliament. Once again, disparate parties unite to quarantine the BJP, the single largest party. The Deve Gowda-led United Front government forges a post election collaboration—JD, TDP, DMK, TMC, AGP, SP, KCP, MPVC, AIIC(T), CPI, FB and RSP, with outside CPM and Congress support. The justification of this opportunism is the Common Minimum Programme. Since the Congress and Gowda are historical rivals, the relationship flops. The Congress endorses I K Gujral as Gowda’s successor. Gujaral quits defending his DMK ministers after the Jain Commission report probing Rajiv’s killing—which suggested the Dravidian party’s involvement—is made public. Within 24 months, DMK turns from a trusted friend to a fatal foe. The Congress precondition for support to Chandra Shekhar, too, was the dismissal of the DMK government in TN.
1998: The fall of the United Front births yet another coalition. The BJP, the single-largest party, gets the support of 13 avaricious outfits—a patchwork of 240 MPs including AIADMK alliance’s 27—with conflicting ideologies. AIADMK votes for a no-confidence motion a year later after Atal Bihari Vajpayee refuses to sack the DMK government.1999: Once again India votes for a hung Lok Sabha. The BJP’s fair-weather enemies join the government citing the need for stability. Vajpayee is PM again, supported by 23 parties in India’s largest-ever coalition. The BJP drops core issues like Ram Mandir, abolition of Article 370 and Uniform Civil Code to survive. The government lasts its full term. After Vajpayee advances polls, the TDP and the DMK drop out of the alliance.
2004: Confident of a hat-trick, the BJP junks many regional partnerships and loses badly. Sonia Gandhi proposes a coalition including even the NCP that had launched personal attacks on her. The mishmash comprising Congress, DMK, AIMIM, PMK, JMM, RJD, TRS, PDP, MDMK, lUML, RPI (A), KC (J), LJP and NCP under Sonia’s leadership win and form two subsequent governments over a decade.2014: In the conflict between two alliances—the NDA and the UPA—Modi leads the BJP to its first majority on its own. He doesn’t abandon BJP allies, but gives them Cabinet berths—except the TDP. Though they chomp at the bit, they cling on fearing retribution to defiance. In 2019, Modi creates history again by winning over 300 seats. He continues to be India’s unchallenged national leader.
The tectonic vote plates have shifted somewhat now. The BJP hasn’t duplicated the national Modi Wave in many states. Last year it lost in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan. It barely won a majority in Gujarat and couldn’t form the government in Karnataka. Maharashtra and Haryana are the new Waterloos. In Haryana, it ceded the deputy chief ministership to Dushyant Chauthala, whose year-old JJP won 11 seats. Previously, it struck deals with Mehbooba Mufti and Nitish Kumar in J&K and Bihar respectively—leaders it considered anti-national or casteist.
The halting of the Modi juggernaut by the Shiv Sena and JJP signals the revival of regional parties and satraps. Mammoth India, vibrant with cultural and political diversity, can be managed effectively only using decentralised democracy; not solo from Indraprastha. With elections looming in Delhi and Jharkhand in 2020, democracy has thrown the gauntlet to the gladiators. It is unlikely that India’s imperator would rest on his laurels. The adaptive statesman he is, perhaps it is time for Modi to disarm the nemesis of federalism by clasping to his bosom the inclusivity of the future.