State elections foretell a power shift at India’s centre

BY PRASENJIT MAITI

More than ever before, one-party India In West Bengal, the Congress formed Building and burning bridges is a thing of the past, and the balance of an alliance with its breakaway faction, These state elections have indicated power is shifting. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress. certain emergent trends in the Indian The Congress performed even better than There were elections to five state party system which are likely to inform the Trinamul Congress in terms of assemblies this past May. The Indian the country’s federal politics in the near percentage of seats it won relative to press described them as a mini general future. the total number of seats it contested. election, a prognosis of the relative health The Congress Party, out of power since of India’s federal political parties and ad- However, the Left Front, led by the 1996, is steadily reconsolidating itself in hoc alliances. Communist Party of India (Marxist), the states with the help of regional allies. returned to power in West Bengal for the In particular, observers looked to these It is a kind of Return-of-the-Prodigal-Son sixth time since 1977. The Communists state elections for indications of a change syndrome. This national party is engaged alone, excluding their coalition partners, in support for the ruling Bharatiya Janata in building bridges with once dissident won 143 out of the total 294 assembly Party-led National Democratic Alliance at but powerful factions such as the seats. New Delhi. The BJP has been in power at Trinamul Congress in West Bengal and the center since 1999 on a platform of The BJP could not manage to win a single the Tamil Manila Congress in Tamil Nadu Hindu nationalism and right-of-center seat in West Bengal despite its traditional and Pondicherry. politics. presence in the outlying districts The Congress Party has also aligned bordering with Bangladesh and in Looking to state elections for indications itself with dominant regional satraps such former Hindu refugee settlements. of federal shifts is not surprising given as Jayaram Jayalalitha of AIADMK who the increasing interaction—though often The Congress-led United Democratic have often called the shots even in New convoluted—between state politics and Front recaptured power in Kerala, in Delhi in the recent past. Her withdrawal the distribution of power at the center. India’s south, defeating the Communist- of support from Prime Minister Atal India has clearly emerged from the time led Left and the Democratic Front. The Behari Vajpayee’s BJP coalition when one establishment party controlled Congress alone captured 62 seats while government in 1999 is a case in point. the center unchallenged. Federal parties the UDF coalition won 99 out of the total In contrast, the BJP is quickly losing have to build coalitions to maintain 140 assembly seats. friends in its effort to cultivate new power, and these coalition partners are In Pondicherry, the All-India Anna Dravida alliances. It has lost the critical support often the federal manifestations of local Munnetra Kazagham (AIADMK) joined of Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal or sectarian interests. forces with the Communists and the (although responsibility for this split Congress-Tamil Manila Congress coalition cannot be exclusively ascribed to the The BJP loses support to win. The BJP managed to win only one BJP). Assam is another example where out of the total 30 seats in the the BJP blundered in choosing its The state elections took place in May Pondicherry assembly, while the electoral ally. 2001, in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Congress-TMC alliance captured 13 seats. Tamil Nadu, and Pondicherry. The State-level leaders of the BJP have also Congress Party (once the dominant party The AIADMK coalition (aligned with the occasionally made the party suffer by of India which has faced substantial Congress) also swept the polls in Tamil falling out with key allies. One such error setbacks since its electoral defeat in Nadu, in India’s south, defeating a of judgement even resulted in the ruling 1996) gained significant ground in coalition allied with the BJP. The AIADMK, Left Front’s single-seat margin defeat of these polls while the BJP faced despite several corruption-related the BJP and TMC in last year’s municipal substantial losses. indictments against its leader, managed election in Salt Lake City, which to capture 132 seats, and its coalition neighbours Calcutta. The Congress Party captured Assam, in now controls 194 out of the 234 seats in India’s northeast, from the Asom Gana The BJP has never been quite the state assembly. Parishad, emerging as the single largest comfortable with the idea of federal party in the 126-member strong state coalition building and power-sharing with assembly. regional parties. This is partly due to its

Federations volume 1, number 5, summer 2001 hierarchical and cadre-based organizational structure. It could also be explained by its political agenda of Regional Parties in India exclusion rather than accommodation of Regional parties first began East Punjab States Union (merged India’s multicultural and plural identities. influencing India’s federal politics with Punjab in 1956), in North India This reluctance to form coalitions can be during and after the country’s Fourth and Madras (present-day Tamil Nadu), deadly to a party looking to gain power in General Election in 1967—an event and in Andhra Pradesh in South India. this most diverse of countries. We have to that is widely thought to be the major The Communists had already formed remember that ex-Indian Prime Minister watershed of Indian politics. the first ever non-Congress Vishwanath Pratap Singh, whose The Congress Party’s exclusive control government in Kerala as early as 1957. government was supported both by the was severely challenged, and the And the Congress increasingly had to “right fundamentalist” BJP and the “left party’s “deinstitutionalization” began rely on coalitions with regional progressive” Communists back in 1989, soon after its unprecedented electoral political parties such as the Jharkhand had once declared: “India is itself a setback. In that election, the Congress Party or Ganatantra Parishad in Orissa. coalition.” Party’s majority was reduced from In the early 1960s the Congress lost It appears that some members of the 361 to 284 seats in the House of the heavily in the state assemblies of West BJP have recognized this fact. As Home People, the lower house of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Kerala, Madras Minister Lal Krishna Advani of the BJP parliament. (South India) and Punjab. once put it: The Congress even lost its majority Some regional opposition parties had “As a broad policy, it should be our in the lower house in 1969. However, started entering into federal electoral endeavour to develop the right coalition the minority government of Indira alliances with one another against the chemistry with our allies by constantly Gandhi (daughter of India’s first Prime Congress. This had the effect of enlarging the area of common interests, Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, of the consolidating the anti-Congress vote. and shrinking—or at any rate inactivating Congress) managed to continue —the area of differences.” in power with the support of the This further encouraged splits within Communists and regional parties such the Congress and defections in the But it’s not clear that the federal BJP will as the Akali Dal from Punjab and the country’s legislatures. However, the be able to adapt to the “New India” and Dravida Munnetra Kazagham from various coalitional state governments recover from the damage it suffered Tamil Nadu. that came to power in 1967 were at the state level. If these elections mostly unstable power arrangements. are indeed an indication of future Before 1967, the Congress managed They suffered from what was developments, there may well be a to win 70 percent or more of the described in the press as a reemergence of a coalition-savvy seats in the House of the People convenient, short-term “ideological Congress party on the federal stage while polling less than 50 percent promiscuity” that was exclusively in the near future. of the popular vote. This was due aimed at unseating the Congress to India’s first-past-the-post *** rather than designing any coherent electoral system. political alternative. All prognostication aside, it is evident that The next largest party in Parliament India’s federal polity has undergone a Such a shift in the arrangements of was the Communist Party of India transition from the one party dominant the party system in India has informed with a presence that ranged from system of rule toward what has been the country’s present-day politics, 16 to 29 seats. The Jana Sangh described as the “polarized pluralism” of characterized by Goliaths like the (forerunner of the BJP) was even successive coalition governments, made Congress or BJP aligning with Davids weaker, with 3 to 14 seats. possible by situation-specific and short- at both the central and regional levels term alliances between regional and Even then, however, the Congress to win elections and successfully run mainstream parties—both at the center could not dominate the state coalition governments. and at the state level. legislative assemblies. This was repeatedly the case in the Patiala and What is uncertain is how these ad-hoc arrangements will affect the fabric of India as a whole. Federal bargains and power sharing have elicited popular frustration with regional parties. Many in India believe these parties have narrow agendas that could drive sectarian wedges into the seams holding India together.

Federations volume 1, number 5, summer 2001