View: 7 reasons we should look forward to a hung Parliament after Lok Sabha elections

By Aakar Patel

I’m hoping for a hung parliament. One so well-hung that its largest party is as small as can possibly be while it all adds up to 272. Or even falls short: Even a minority government is welcome. It doesn’t matter either, beyond a point, whether this is a government formed by the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Congress. Here are the reasons.

The first good thing about minority governments, particularly rainbow-type coalitions as we saw in the late 1990s (where the Cabinet was composed of non-Congress, non-BJP elements), is that they tend to be more federal. Meaning that there is greater emphasis on the states over the Centre. This is a very good thing in a part of the world where the polity and narrative is hijacked by an aggressive Centre. The other positive aspect is that India’s Union government sees more participation from sidelined places like the Northeast and Kashmir in such a phase.


The second product of minority government is that people outside government, like civil society organisations and activists, have some levers available to influence change. In dispositions like the one just ending, this is not easy. Majority governments tend to be less open to ideas and agendas outside their own core interests. Indeed they are often hostile.

But in the event that the government does open itself up, and this is the third point, it is often the case that our nation and its countrywomen benefit. We had very fine legislation and humane laws like the right to work (MNREGA), Right to Information, Right to Food and Right to Education because good people like Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze and Farah Naqvi were on the advisory council that pressured Manmohan Singh’s UPA into doing the right thing.

The counter to this, the fourth point, is that the opposite happens in majority government, especially one led by strong figures. It is not easy to conceive and execute masterstrokes like demonetisation and the surgical strike when one has to accommodate other minds and various interests in decision-making. Stupidity and recklessness need an antidote, and an effective one is to be found in the sharing and prior approval of genius ideas that affect hundreds of millions.

The fifth point is that majority governments universally tend to bite off more than they can chew and make a hash of execution. A more modest agenda focused on doing the smaller things right usually is more beneficial than grandiose attempts that seek to overturn the status quo.

In our part of the world we cannot separate the majority from the majoritarian. This is the sixth point and all the evidence before us shows that we Indians cannot be trusted to properly resist majoritarianism when it emanates from the Centre. Our instincts appear to be tribal and base and a few lynchings here or there or the continued barbarism visited upon fellow Indians (say in Kashmir or the Adivasi belt) is acceptable to us. Indeed it is applauded. Best it remain in check.

Seventh, it is not right to assume, as my fellow Gujaratis in the stock market appear to do all the time, that a minority government is bad for the economy. Our history doesn’t validate that thesis.

It was in a minority government that economic reform originated. The data over the last 28 years will not lead one to conclude that the 2014-2019 period (the only one with a majority) produced better numbers than the two decades or so before it.

These are the reasons why I want a Parliament that is hung and the sort of government that is described as weak and indecisive, by those who haven’t really thought it through. You could examine majority governments up and down the decades and see the same patterns as the ones described above. Bank nationalisation and the Emergency came from a government whose members in the Lok Sabha numbered 352. On the other hand, the 1997-98 ‘Dream Budget’ was passed by a government that collapsed a few weeks later and was headed by a PM whose party had but 46 seats.

It is foolhardy to assume that parties or alliances that cross 272 produce stability or that this stability in turn produces economic reform which then helps along GDP growth. There are other ways to skin this cat.

Of course it is true that sensible people will be repelled by messianic and pantomime figures referring to themselves in the third person (which would make them ridiculous in any civilised democracy). But there is also a positive reason, indeed many, to be attracted to the idea of a coalition, a word whose Latin root is ‘fellowship’, and which means the ‘growing together of parts’.