A Front for Disaster

India, like any other nation, can only be ruled from its center, not the periphery. In 2014, it will be either UPA-3 or NDA-2. Every other speculation is wild imagination laced with wishful thinking

Now that we are into the final year of UPA-2, political soothsayers cannot have a day off. Yet the business has got messy. Their usual two-option game, with heads for UPA and tails for NDA, has taken a tricky turn this time round for two reasons. Congress, which is the fulcrum of the UPA coalition, is stressed after two terms and its partners, having sensed it, are leaving. But NDA, the flipside of the betting coin, is also heavily corroded. BJP’s projection of Narendra Modi, its trump card no doubt but too tough a cookie nevertheless, has left NDA co-members and potential supporters jumping in their skin. Even if BJP gets the numbers, if it insists on being led by Modi, it will be difficult for it to gather enough friendly shoulders to lift it to government.

And this has triggered speculation about a Third Front excluding both Congress and BJP, like it happened in the interim between 1996 and 1998. The speculation is further fuelled by evident consolidation, over the decades in some cases, and more recently in others, of regional parties in the mainline states like Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Jammu & Kashmir. They account for nearly half the Lok Sabha seats. Besides, the relations with either of the national parties, Congress and BJP, and its regional props, are getting increasingly acrimonious. The question being asked is: from where will the biggies get their coalition partners? A recent example is the BJP-JD(U) slugfest in Bihar over Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s summary refusal to accept Modi as NDA’s prime ministerial candidate. Relations between Congress and its alliance partner NCP in Maharashtra—the party founded by former Congress stalwart Sharad Pawar—is also no less troubled though both Congress and Pawar have been diplomatic enough to keep it simmering. On the other hand, Congress’s two largest UPA partners, Trinamool Congress and DMK, have marched away.

In 1996, the situation was somewhat alike. though in politics, as in history, no two situations can be entirely alike. In that year, in terms of seats won, BJP overtook Congress for the first time. It was the highest number of seats won by the BJP in the 1996 poll. But as it came too soon after the highly polarizing act by BJP of demolition of the Babri structure in Ayodhya, most of the other smaller parties declined to form government with BJP. That left Atal Bihari Vajpayee scoring the arguably Pyrrhic victory of becoming prime minister for just 13 days. The collapse of the Vajpayee cabinet was followed by a year of uncertainty, and absolutely rudderless governance, with the two feckless regimes of H. D. Deve Gowda and I. K. Gujral coming and going. In today’s political discourse, this so-called United Front government is being cited as early outline of the Third Front or the Federal Front. Many regional leaders are eager to see it materialize once again. They think it is all the more possible now because with democracy expanding, it is the state which is seen as the repository of political power. And as state hegemony, the regional leaders think that their control on the local electoral machinery is total, leaving very limited wiggle room for the national parties.

This line of thinking is delusional, and, if it still happens, its consequences can be nothing short of disastrous. It is delusional because the regional parties have local enmities so strong that they cannot unite as a confederation. In last year’s assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party polled 29 per cent votes while its bête noire, BSP led by Mawati, got 25 per cent. For them, even to see each other’s face is the worst nightmare, not to speak of joining the same coalition. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who floated the idea of a ‘federal front’, could well have remembered that even though her Trinamool Congress, in an alliance with Congress that has been dissolved since then, could manage to dislodge the CPM-led Left Front in the 2011 assembly elections from its 34-year-long monopoly of power, the Front still managed to obtain 41.12 per cent votes. If Mamata and CPM are trapped into a coalition by a strange coincidence, it will not last even a day. The bad blood is no less between, say, DMK and AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, or Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav, the proverbial Bihari gladiators.

A coalition of regional players and caste or neighborhood leaders is not only impossible. It is undesirable too. To understand why, all one needs is an action replay of UPA-2 in office, with its constituents bringing so little to the table by way of governance, and taking so much away to satisfy their local whimsies, no matter if these clashed with national interests. For example, it is in India’s strategic interest that she has neighboring Sri Lanka on her side. But both DMK and AIADMK, however embittered be their own relations, are firm in their support to the cause of the Tamil diaspora. Before DMK quit the UPA, it pressured the Center to vote against Colombo in a UN body. It was much against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s own judgment. Besides, there is a rising demand of the backward, and inefficient, states in eastern India, notably Bihar and West Bengal, for being accorded a “special status”, which means expectation of grants and loan waivers that are way beyond the sharing arrangement stipulated by the Finance Commission. In the face of a sharp economic deceleration and negligible creation of jobs, it is a sure prescription for fiscal disaster.

India, like any other nation, can only be ruled from its center, not the periphery. Further, ruling a country of India’s diversity and size calls for a vision in time and space, an idea of India, in short. Two of India’s most admired prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpayee,  were Indians first and local leaders in passing. In 2014, it will be either UPA-3 or NDA-2. Every other speculation is wild imagination laced with wishful thinking and a sure recipe of disaster witnessed in 1967 (SVD), 1977 (Janata Party), 1989 (Janata Dal supported from outside by BJP & Left Front) and 1996-98 (United Front supported from outside by Congress).
(The author is National Editor, Lokmat Group of newspapers)