Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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The making of a coalition is no more a matter of choice for the parties opposed to the right-wing authoritarian postures of the BJP but a command from the common people. The churning on the ground among almost all social groups is exerting pressure on the Opposition parties to jettison their minor differences and rally together to protect and safeguard institutions that are currently under attack. Reasserting democracy The 2019 election is going to reassert and reconstitute the idea of democracy with particular emphasis on inclusion, representation and participation. The tenets of the making of a coalition or alliances this time are quite similar to those in 1977, when supposedly divergent political outfits came together to pose a united challenge to the hegemonic politics then of the Indian National Congress. By and large, we are committed to the core ideas which constitute the idea of India: freedom, liberty, social and economic justice, and secularism. These shall be the focal points of our manifesto or common minimum programme. We know that, in spite of a chequered history, coalitions in India have earned particularly bad publicity from the liberal quarters, especially the economic liberals who denigrate coalition governments as ‘weak governments’. As all popular ideas often are, this too is a fallacious idea. Coalitions, by virtue of embodying internal democracies within the executive, are more democratic because partner parties (especially small and regional parties) have their ears closer to the ground. They represent the true aspirations of national communities because they keep the larger and national political parties more accountable and are less likely to lapse into arrogance. Our scepticism of coalitions is rooted in several difficulties of coalition politics. The first is related to the difficulty of cobbling together a coalition. Ideological distance between parties is sometimes difficult to bridge; at other times, the social distance between voter constituencies is an obstacle. The second is to do with keeping a coalition together. Agreeing upon a practical common minimum programme is a must for providing stability to a coalition. Ideological nuances must be set aside against an imminent threat or for a longer-term political project. An imperative The significant point is that all Opposition parties have also drawn their lessons from the points mentioned above. The past behaviour of coalition partners is often assumed to be the sole indicator of their commitments to any future coalition with them. This gives rise to the problem that parties in a coalition continue to labour under a trust deficit and never effectively prioritise investments in a coalition for fear of upsetting their core support base or in the hope of increasing their influence. Neither in real politics nor theoretically is it impossible that coalition partners who have had trouble in the past can manage to come together again. The RJD has shown this by actually doing it in the last Bihar Assembly elections with the Mahagathbandhan. We continue to believe in the inherent value of coalitions. Coalition politics is an imperative now more than ever before because of the stress and threat to the very ideas of social justice. If today, the Opposition parties fail to come together, they would be pushing the marginalised communities in India, especially Dalits and minorities who did gain a little ground in society and polity, to lose their meagre but hard-earned benefits from the state.
