R Ravimohan: Coalition politics: The bleak side

National or state elections, big states or small, the prospect of any large party gaining a tangible mandate appears to be getting more difficult with each passing election.

While the reality of the resultant coalition governments is largely accepted, it is important to understand why this trend has become so pronounced in recent years, and the intention of this article is not to lament the emergence of coalition governments.

If the thesis that this is symptomatic of the progressive dilution of the national agenda holds validity, then we also have the task of fashioning a new national agenda for the country as a whole.

The elections held in 1991 resulted in a minority government formed by the Congress party, which later obtained a majority. No election since then""1996, 1998, 1999 and 2004 ""has allowed a single party to form a viable government.

Five coalition governments have ruled the country, the coalition being typically formed by at least some components joining after the results, indicating opportunism rather than strategic partnership.

Since the beginning of 2004, eight states have gone to the polls. The developments in Bihar and Jharkhand apart, Orissa is governed by the NDA, and Karnataka and Maharashtra by Congress-led coalitions.

These trends may be the result of one or more of the following factors:

1. The electorate's needs, demands, and aspirations may be changing more rapidly than is understood by the political parties.
   
2. The political parties' efforts in understanding their constituency may be reducing.
   
3. Constituencies might be getting segmented in different ways and more finely, with more differentiated needs.
   
   
4. Parties themselves may be getting more heterogeneous and therefore the uniform campaign of the party might not appeal to the more finely segmented local constituencies.

One reason why national-level parties appeared more viable in the past is that they seemed more able to address a national agenda. The Indian National Congress absorbed Gandhiji's freedom movement into its agenda for the country and set its course for winning several mandates on this basis. The more distant the nation got from the freedom event, the less appeal this agenda had for its constituents.

Several agendas have emerged in different geographical parts and demographic segments of the country since. These include poverty, caste, religion, state-level issues, and some weak economic issues""mostly inflation-related. But no single national-level agenda that appeals and is relevant to the nation as a whole has emerged to take as strong a place in Indians' minds as the freedom movement.

Not only has the nationally unifying theme of freedom withered, it has perhaps left a vacuum for the most part, creating scope for frivolous motivations to usurp the political mandate.

Progressive disenfranchisement has resulted in the entire political paradigm being built bottom-up to an extent, rather than the top-down system we had begun as an independent country after our freedom.

This has meant that politics now has a small circle of influence, covering local issues, and that political leaders struggle to aggregate this to any meaningful size. So there is a dominance of local leaders, as opposed to national or even state-level leaders.

These local leaders have to combine forces by hook or by crook, thereby fracturing the integrity of the national-level political system. The quality of political leadership, after all, cannot be any better than the sum of its components.

This has led to the current dichotomy of the diminishing influence of political leaders and an ever-increasing diversity in the political stock. One of the most undesirable consequences has been the emergence of criminal politics that has taken deep root in our polity, in the absence of any credible challenge with strong motivation.

The other systemic problem is the lack of a unified approach to national-level issues like economic development, health, and education, or indeed to reforms and foreign policy.

A declining appreciation of these issues, in the face of a whole series of local ones, has meant that the political system has perforce to co-opt professionals, who lead the government's efforts to keep the nation chugging along. Thank God for this sensible arrangement. But for this foresight and sagacity, we as a nation might have faced much greater challenges both to our sovereignty and the development front.

However, one of the problems has been that national-level issues have become tools of negotiation amongst political leaders with no ideological ground but just an agenda of their own. It is then left to the professional leaders like our Prime Minister, finance minister, and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission to negotiate sensible policies through a maze of local interests, leading to what appears to be less than cogent implementation.

We often find that good policies get packaged with not so good ones to accommodate these factional interests. Given the complexity posed by the enormous size of the polity and the sheer diversity of political interests that are now brought to bear at the national level, the nation seems to be doing a noteworthy job.

The system is also increasingly becoming adept at dealing with these complex issues, if the last few months' track record of the new government is any indication,

Therein lies the rub. This apparent success in dealing with the coalition of power lines is masking the fundamental issue of the diminishing appeal of broader national-level issues.

Economic development, education, health, poverty, national security, food security, the national market system, balanced geographical growth, the uplift of weaker sections of society, social safety nets, and issues of these nature, which ought to be a common agenda of every political leader and therefore emerge as a de facto national agenda, appear less prominent in national debates; these debates are dominated instead by religion, localised violence, local politics at the state level or even within states, rebellion in state units of various political parties, caste issues, and the like.

If the trend is projected unabated, then the future political debates will see even less engagement with national-level issues.

To effectively address this concern, it will be good if large political parties begin an exercise of uniting their leaderships along some common lines of preparation. The first step for any party is to recognise the presence of mandatory national issues and have a clear stand on each item.

Then this should be effectively bought into by all of its leadership, so that a unified communication is made in each of its local constituencies. They could also use surveys and interactions with their constituencies to both understand their demands and educate them on some minimum acceptable national priorities.

Currently, the presence of sagacious and capable professional leaders ensures that these issues are addressed. We need to strengthen the system to ensure that the national-level priorities do not depend on the wisdom of a few wise persons.