Coalition politics in India has for long mocked the Cabinet form of government, weakening the authority of the prime minister and his Council of Ministers. This is not a new phenomenon. All coalitions have been afflicted by this internal division of power and responsibility between party political leaders and the political leadership in government. The communists developed a theory around this by arguing that the party is above government and made the late Jyoti Basu, former chief minister of West Bengal, report to his party boss, the late Pramode Dasgupta, regularly. This practice set a precedent for Mr Bal Thackeray to use a proxy, Mr Manohar Joshi, to run his party-led coalition government in Maharashtra. Mr Lalu Prasad went a step further by getting his wife to sit in the chief minister’s chair in Patna, while he ran the show. Given this history of subordination of the Cabinet form of government to party political power necessities, it was only a matter of time before political leaders in New Delhi started imitating these regional leaders. Prime Ministers Deve Gowda and Inder Gujral were hostage not just to their own party bosses, but also to those of their coalition allies. Even Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had this problem with his party. Thus, he could not get the finance minister he wanted in 1998 and he could not get his party to back him on his decision to seek the resignation of Chief Minister Narendra Modi after the post-Godhra massacres in Gujarat. By now, the country has come to accept the division of power and responsibility between the party and/or parties in power and the government in office.
Even so, it is jarring to see leaders of coalition parties reject in public the very same Budget proposals that their ministerial representatives in government had approved in Cabinet meetings. If the DMK or the Trinamool Congress did not like finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s Budget proposals, their ministers in the UPA government could have said so in the Cabinet meeting that approved the Budget. They could have quit in protest. They didn’t. It is even more galling to see the coalition’s main party, the Congress party, resort to this very same game of hunting with the hounds and running with the hares. If Mr Mukherjee’s budgetary proposals had the imprimatur of the Union Cabinet headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and if the PM has said there will be no rollback of the hike in petrol prices, why then does the Congress party have to wait for the last word on the matter from party president Sonia Gandhi?
