Editor’s Note: Saba Naqvi’s ‘Politics of Jugaad’ poses some of the key questions of this election season. Naqvi examines the history of coalition governments in India and tries to understand the strengths and pitfalls of such governments. While coalition governments are often “unstable,” Naqvi analyzes whether coalition governments are a better choice for a country as diverse as India.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
The story told by many in the mainstream media today makes coalitions almost dangerous for the country. The allegations are that they are inherently unstable and extractive in nature, implying that smaller players are in a position to blackmail the larger party at the center of a coalition. Some criticisms are justified, but there is also an exaggerated fear of coalitions. The truth is, many of us grew up under coalitions – the only thing is we didn’t experience it that way. We thought we were under the government of Manmohan Singh or the Atal Bihari Vajpayee and identified a complex regime with one person, when in fact we have largely had a coalition government in India since 1989. A change took place in 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a simple majority in parliament. It is since then that the story of some sections of the media started to posit the one-party government under a strong leader as the only answer for India.
The fascination for a ‘great leader’, such as Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi, has become ubiquitous. The words used for him are ‘decisive’, ‘strong’ and ‘individual in authority’. In the past, Indira Gandhi would have fitted the same mold. I started this book by looking up the meanings of ‘coalesce’ and ‘coalition’. In short, this is what I got from my search. The word ‘coalesce’, I’d imagined, could come from the collision of two objects.
However, it means something different. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, “to merge” means to combine into a single group or thing. A coalition, as we understand very well in India, means the coming together of different political parties or groups. India is the second most populous country in the world and the largest democracy. It is in a sense a coalition of states where people speak different languages and have different linguistic and cultural histories. Yet somehow coalitions have a bad association in some of our minds as inherently unstable. It is true that in the past only coalitions with a major party as the pivot have survived their term. Looking to the future, we can say that a mere collection of regional parties is unlikely to survive a term, as the orientation of each constituency would be only on their region and perhaps not on the nation as a whole. Still, it’s better to recognize that anything can happen and there are no hard and fast rules.
The most common accusation against coalitions is that they are bad for governance. But if we examine economic data, it turns out that some of our most prosperous years were under coalition governments. As a non-expert on economics, I would like to refer to others.
According to a detailed report published in The Economics Times on September 29, 2017, a coalition government that had consensus on policy-making was likely better than the majority government in terms of economic growth. Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor YV Reddy, who led the institution from 2003 to 2008, told the audience during a speech before the Hudson Institute, a top US think tank in Washington DC, that since economic liberalization that began under the premiership of PV Narasimha Rao, India’s GDP growth rate was highest in fiscal 2007 when it reached 9.6 percent under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) led by Manmohan Singh. “Interestingly, the highest growth in India from 1990 to 2014 really took place during coalition governments,” said Reddy. “So in a sense it’s consensus-based… In [the] Indian situation, a coalition will probably deliver better economic results than a strong government.’ He’s not the only person to have said this — other economists and commentators have also noted that coalitions don’t suggest poor economic growth. *In addition, there are other values, such as equality, that are difficult to measure, that coalitions can bring to the table.
At a time when they are also the result of highly legitimate electoral processes, it can be argued that coalitions can be fundamentally more just and representative than one-party regimes. Coalitions give real clout to the states parties and thus to the populations of the regions. One could therefore argue that, in theory, the most representative regime a country like India could have is a coalition of state parties. Grab a hundred rupee bill and look at the picture of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi on the right; in the middle is ‘100 rupees’ in bold in Hindi; turn the note over and in the left corner is a small column with ‘100 rupees’ written in fifteen Indian languages.
The currency we deal with every day takes into account our extraordinary social makeup as a nation: we have different languages with their own scripts and literature (in addition to the many dialects within the languages). My question then is this: why would a party that does well in the Hindi speaking parts of India inevitably lead the nation? Some of our key political leaders have been repeatedly elected from Uttar Pradesh (UP) – Jawaharlal Nehru (Phulpur), Lal Bahadur Shastri (also from seats around Allahabad), Indira Gandhi (Rae Bareli, although she once competed from Chikmagalur in Karnataka), Rajiv Gandhi (Amethi), Vishwanath Pratap Singh, or VP Singh (Allahabad), Chandra Shekhar (Ballia), Sonia Gandhi (Rae Bareli), Vajpayee (Lucknow), and PM Modi (Varanasi).
With the exception of Sonia Gandhi, everyone else has been prime minister. HD Deve Gowda from Karnataka, Narasimha Rao from Andhra Pradesh and Morarji Desai from Maharashtra also became Prime Ministers. Manmohan Singh was a Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament (MP) and Inder Kumar Gujral had once contested a Lok Sabha poll of Jalandhar in Punjab. I grew up in Delhi but UP is where my family is from, spread across towns in Awadh with ancestral village in Rae Bareli district. I like the state and I understand its language, expressions and cultural tones. It also educated me on caste and community politics. But it is a backward and poor society and has not made impressive progress on indices such as health and education. It has also not seen significant economic growth, and unemployment is rampant, as is crime.
Yes, it is the most populous state in the country, with a population larger than many major countries.” In 2014, Modi, the former prime minister of Gujarat for twelve years, left his home state and rose from Varanasi’s parliamentary seat in UP when he made the successful bid for the premiership. Varanasi (or Kashi), the holy city on the Ganges, has an all-Indian symbolism that permeates the consciousness of many Hindus, especially those of the higher castes. As we head for the 2019 elections, in UP, not far from my family village, Ayodhya is being re-presented as an all-Indian symbol embodying Lord Ram, in an effort to create a certain religio-political consciousness.
Still, it’s a valid question for us to ask: why can’t we have a prime minister of Vadodara in principle?
in Gujarat, the other chair Modi got off of in 2014 and then gave up? Why is it beyond the range of probability that a Prime Minister can come from Tamil Nadu or Kerala or the Northeast? Do we believe that a leader who represents the Hindi-speaking regions is more representative of India than those from other regions? However, it is the states in South and West India that have much better economic growth. One has to wonder if at some point other parts of India will resent the sheer political influence of the complex but backward state of UP. This is happening in Europe where, in countries like Spain, the more affluent parts hate carrying the can for the rest of the country. But as things stand, UP will once again have a major impact on the 2019 elections, as the ruling party, the BJP, got most of its MPs from the state in 2014.
In the 2014 general election, the BJP won a simple majority with a 31 percent vote share in the first-past-the-post system that India follows, as the votes of the opposition parties were divided. It was one of the most successful vote-to-seat conversions in our country’s history. Congress had a dismal showing in 2014, with just 19 percent of the vote and the lowest number of seats in parliament at 44.
But combine the voting shares of the two leading national parties, and it was 50 percent. That shows that even in national elections, where people voted for a government in the center and not in the states, other parties got the remaining 50 percent or half of the vote. Our search for a coalition that is truly representative and stable therefore has great legitimacy. But there are pitfalls in this exercise because of the conflicting interests and egos of those who run political parties.
The following excerpt from Politics Of Jugaad by Saba Naqvi is published with permission from Rupa Publications. The hardcover of the book costs Rs 395.