Elections are round the corner and the political rhetoric is rising, pregnant with possibilities. Few are willing to hazard a guess about the shape of the next coalition government in New Delhi. Political leaders are full of bluster. But talk to them in confidence and they will confess that they don’t really know what could happen.
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| Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |
One opinion poll (conducted by the Center for the Study of Developing Societies for the CNN-IBN television channel) indicated that a United-Progressive-Alliance-kind-of-coalition, led by the Congress and including the Samajwadi Party, would fall short of the 272 majority mark in the Lok Sabha and may need the support of the Left as well as other smaller regional political parties to form the government. Another poll (by CVOTER) does not rule out the possibility of a ‘third front’ government led by Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party and supported by the Left as well as the Telugu Desam Party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and others. The Bharatiya-Janata-Party-led National Democratic Alliance coalition seems to be on the defensive.
Why? Here are a few reasons. The BJP is still a house divided. First, it was veteran Bhairon Singh Shekhawat who was sniping at his party. Then, Kalyan Singh ditched the BJP for his ‘friend’ Mulayam Singh Yadav. The Muslims are not exactly overjoyed with this development—after all Kalyan Singh was chief minister of Uttar Pradesh when the Babri Masjid was demolished in December 1992. The BJP is certainly not amused. Lal Krishna Advani knows this may be his last chance to become PM. Narendra Modi is waiting in the wings.
The BJP hopes to perform better in Gujarat (where it obtained 14 out of the 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state in the 2004 elections), Karnataka (18 out of 28), Jharkhand (one out of 14), Haryana (one out of 10), and Maharashtra (13 out of 48). Its ally hopes to gain in Bihar—the Janata Dal (United) led by current chief minister, Nitish Kumar, won only six out of 40 seats in 2004. The Shiv Sena is divided and may not get more than the 12 Lok Sabha seats it won five years ago. Where else does the NDA hope to gain? Nowhere. Can the NDA then return to power with the support of the TDP and the AIADMK, and a few opportunistic parties in the UPA such as Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party? The BJP hopes this will happen, but it is far from confident about such a denouement.
If a Congress-led UPA coalition returns to power that is dependent on both the Left and the SP, would Manmohan Singh again become prime minister? Yes and no. General secretary of the Communist Party of India – Marxist, Prakash Karat, has gone on record saying that while his party would prefer a non-Congress, non-BJP coalition to form the government, if it came to a choice between a coalition of which the Congress is a part and a coalition with the BJP, the former would certainly be chosen.
Karat was then asked whether the CPI-M would then support Dr Manmohan Singh as a prime ministerial candidate after the bad blood that was created over the nuclear deal with the United States, to which he responded that policies and ideology mattered more than personalities. If not Manmohan Singh, who, then, could become the next PM? Sonia Gandhi? Seems unlikely. Pranab Mukherjee? That’s a good possibility as the Bengali-babu’s personal relations with the Communists are not all that bad. What about Rahul Gandhi? Well, he could become a minister perhaps?
Is there any possibility of the so-called ‘third front’ forming the next government? Mayawati has made no secret of her ambition to become PM. Here’s how the arithmetic may work out. The number of MPs owing allegiance to the Left parties shrinks in size from 60 to 40 (with the Communists losing 20-odd seats in West Bengal and Kerala). The BSP wins around 40 Lok Sabha seats in comparison to the 19 it won in 2004. The number of MPs with the TDP rises from five at present to, say, 20 out of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in Andhra Pradesh. After all, the TDP is being supported this time around by both the Left (that won two seats in 2004) as well as the Telengana Rashtra Samithi (that won five seats). As for Tamil Nadu, the big question is whether Jayalalitha will be able to convincingly defeat the ruling DMK after her party was completely wiped out in the 2004 elections—the AIADMK unable to win even a single Lok Sabha seat out of the 39 in the state.
If the AIADMK bounces back, the number of MPs owing allegiance to Left, the BSP, the TDP, and the AIADMK put together could cross the 120 mark. What happens then? Would the Congress and the so-called ‘secular’ political forces come together and support the ‘third front’? Would particular constituents of both the UPA and the NDA—such as the Nationalist Congress Party led by Sharad Pawar or the JD(U) led by Nitish Kumar—choose to support such an amorphous coalition? In other words, would the country then go through a period of unstable politics as it did between 1996 and 1998 when the post of prime minister was held by no less than four individuals (PV Narasimha Rao, AB Vajpayee, HD Deve Gowda, and IK Gujral)?
Well, in the world’s largest democracy, anything is possible.
The author is an educator, an economic analyst and a journalist with over 30 years of experience in various media—print, radio, television, Internet and documentary cinema.
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