Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Should India move towards a two party system? Will the fragmented, multi-party polity of the world’s second most populous nation-state soon resemble that of the United States or Britain?
Opinion is sharply divided on the first question while analysts believe that India’s political system is unlikely, in the short run at least, to converge around two political parties. In other words, the current era of coalition politics in the country, often characterised by shifting, opportunistic alliances, is unlikely to end in the near future.
Debates on the subject have come up in the context of the electoral victory, earlier this month, of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in India’s largest province, Uttar Pradesh (UP). The BSP is not aligned with either the nationally-ruling Congress party or its arch-rival the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
On several occasions in the past, the BJP had opportunistically supported the BSP led by Mayawati (one name), a charismatic, unmarried woman, as chief minister of UP. But this time around, her party has obtained a simple majority in the legislative assembly with a margin that has confounded most political observers and opinion pollsters.
Uttar Pradesh accounts for roughly a sixth of India’s total population of 1.1 billion. The province returns 80 out of the 543 members of the lower house of Parliament or Lok Sabha. If UP had been an independent nation, it would have been the sixth most populous country in the world. All but a handful of India’s prime ministers have come from the state -- it used to often be said that whoever is in power in Lucknow (the capital of UP) would also rule New Delhi.
At present, the Congress -- India’s ‘grand old party’ that led the freedom movement against British colonial rule and governed the country for around four decades -- heads the centre-left United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition that runs the federal government. The right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP leads the opposition National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition that was voted out of power in the May 2004 general elections.
Significantly, both the BJP and the Congress have been marginalised in the UP elections that saw the BSP, a regional political outfit with a strong support base among the low castes, come to power in the province.
What was particularly ironical was that a day before the outcome of the UP elections were known, on May 10, while addressing Parliament, the President of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam said: “Many challenges need to be responded to: the emergence of multi-party coalitions as a regular form of government that needs to rapidly evolve as a stable, two-party system”.
However, many political analysts contend that far from becoming bipolar, India’s polity could further fragment with small, regional and caste-based political parties acquiring greater influence. “Those who believe India is moving towards a two party system are indulging in wishful thinking,” says Yogendra Yadav, senior fellow at the independent Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and one of India’s best known psephologists.
Yadav told IPS in an interview that those who think India should become like the U.S. or Britain have a “narrow and mistaken reading of the working of Western democracies and should instead look at other countries like France, Germany and Italy which have had coalition governments for many years”.
Until a few years ago, political observers would argue that coalition regimes were a bit of an aberration in India and that single-party rule was the preferred norm. That thinking has since changed and many concede that the current phase of coalition politics in the country is likely to continue beyond the next general elections that are scheduled for 2009.
“I will not be surprised if the pattern of the 2004 elections is repeated in 2009 with two loose coalitions emerging, some small parties shifting their allegiances and a significant intermediate political space with parties providing outside support to the coalition that comes to power,” predicts E. Sridharan, academic director, Institute for the Advanced Study of India that is affiliated to the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S.
The incumbent UPA coalition -- with more than a dozen parties led by the Congress -- in New Delhi does not command a majority in India’s lower house of Parliament or the Lok Sabha. The UPA government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh depends on the outside support of 61 MPs belonging to four Left parties for its very survival.
In an interview with IPS, Sridharan pointed to the fact that in most parts of India other than UP, “the two main candidates in any election, at the local or at the federal level, tend to obtain around three-fourths of the total votes cast”. However, this apparent bi-polarity at a local level disappears when the all-India political picture is put together. In only seven out of the 28 provinces in India are the Congress and the BJP the principal political adversaries. These states account for less than one-fifth of the seats in the Lok Sabha.
There are provinces where either the Congress or the BJP is the major political player (as in UP, Bihar, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh) and there are provinces (like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal) where neither the BJP nor the Congress can claim to be one of the poles of the polity.
In 2004, for the first time in India’s six-decade-old history as a politically independent country, two major coalitions contested elections but neither came close to obtaining a majority. The Congress and the BJP put together (without their allies in the UPA and NDA respectively) obtained 283 seats in the Lok Sabha, just 11 above the half-way mark.
“While the days of one-party rule are over in India and there are indeed two major coalitions, these formations are loose enough not to resemble political parties,” says Yadav, adding that “there is nothing artificial about this aspect of the Indian reality because, after all, a multi-party system better reflects the social diversity of the country”.
Inter Press Service
