Coalition cocktail gives reforms the right punch

NEW DELHI: Does lack of a clear majority for a party or alliance mean political instability? The answer is a resounding yes, going by market sentiment. India’s recent political history suggests otherwise, however.
A strong, stable, government at the Centre has gone hand in hand with extreme instability in the polity while minority governments with unpredictable half-life have presided over rejuvenation of the economy and the polity.
The point is fairly simple: stability of the regime at the Centre cannot be conflated with stability of the polity as a whole.
Consider the 8th Lok Sabha, December ’84 to November ’89, the Lok Sabha in which Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government had a rock solid majority —409 of the House’s 538 members belonged to that party. Or take the 7th Lok Sabha, February ’80 to December ’84.
In the general elections that produced that Lok Sabha, Indira Gandhi’s campaign for a government that works had drummed up an MP contingent of 369 for the Congress.
A far cry from the current predicament where parties and alliances see securing a simple majority as ultimate triumph.
The 80s was a decade in which strong governments with crushing majorities ruled at the Centre. Yet, it was a period of extreme political instability that led to the assassination of two prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi (Rajiv Gandhi was killed in 1991 but that was a left-over of the 80s).
The Assam agitation gave new momentum to secessionist strife in the northeast, the Khalistan movement threw up one of the world’s most violent versions of terrorism in the north-west, Sri Lankan Tamil groups were staging their liquidations games in Tamil Nadu, separatism flared up in Kashmir and the most divisive and gory campaign of communal mobilisation, for demolishing the Babri mosque at Ayodhya, delivered body-blows to the Constitution’s secular foundation all over the country.

Between 1989 and 1999, the government at the Centre had an unambiguous majority only for three years — between 1993 and 1996 when bribes secured the support of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha for what had been a minority government headed by Narasimha Rao.
There were six changes in the prime minister’s office, PMs ran minority governments dependent on the support of political parties with fickle commitment to anything other than self-interest.
Yet the nineties saw peace return to Punjab and Assam, different secessionist groups of the northeast smoked the peace pipe, elections were held in Kashmir, Mandal passions subsided, Tigers were externed to Lanka and India launched radical economic reforms.
The reforms have resulted in India’s emancipation from both dependence on external aid mediated by the Aid India consortium for foreign exchange, and from the Hindu rate of growth.
However, Hindutva has remained as a legacy of the nineties that saw the Ayodhya demolition, a communal flare-up in its immediate wake and a longish period of calm subsequently.
However, that calm, it would appear, has been incubating a storm whose first vicious burst we saw in Gujarat in ’02. This had less to do with the degree of stability of the government at the Centre than with the spread of the ideology of Hindutva, with and without the help of the state machinery.
The short point is that many things go into the making of political stability and schism, and the numerical strength of the government at the Centre is just one factor among many, and not necessarily the most important.