A month after they first lined up to vote in India’s mammoth general election, the country’s voters will learn the outcome on Saturday. The election, staggered over five phases — involving five polling days over four weeks, rather than one “election day” — will determine who rules the world’s largest democracy. Only one thing is certain: No single party will win a majority on its own. India is set for more coalition rule.
That may not be a bad thing. India’s last two governments each served a full term and presided over significant economic growth, even though they comprised 23 and 20 parties respectively. Coalition politics gives representation to the myriad interests that make up a diverse and complex society, and ensures that the country as a whole accepts the policies ultimately adopted.
But coalition rule can also often mean governance of the lowest common denominator, as resistance by any of the government’s significant members to a policy can delay or even thwart it. In India’s parliamentary system, if a coalition loses its majority, the government falls and keeping allies together can sometimes prove a greater priority than getting things done.
India’s national elections are really an aggregate of 30 different state elections, each influenced by its own local considerations, regional political currents and different patterns of political incumbency. Soon after Saturday, the largest single party that emerges will seek to construct a coalition out of a diverse array of victors from the various states.
Several outcomes are possible.
The most likely is that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Indian National Congress Party, currently leading the government, emerges once again as the largest single party and assembles a new ruling coalition. The main alternative would be a majority alliance put together by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by the 82-year-old Lal Krishna Advani.
But there is a third possibility: A motley collection of regional parties, together with the Communists, gets enough seats to prevent either of the two big parties from forming a government. In that case, a “hung parliament” could see a “third front” coming to power as a minority government, supported tactically by one of the big parties. This has happened before — and each time, the government that resulted fell within a year.
Each alternative could have serious implications for India. Though the big parties are broadly committed to continuing an economic policy of liberalization and growth, the BJP is mostly focused on the well-being of India’s merchant class, whereas Congress wishes to redistribute enhanced government revenues to the poor through generous social programs.
The left, which would strongly influence any “third front” government, are staunchly opposed to economic liberalization and wish to strengthen, rather than dilute, India’s large public sector.
In foreign policy, India’s growing closeness with the US under both the BJP and the Congress has proved controversial at home, with leftist parties threatening to scrap the Indo-US nuclear deal and break defense ties with Israel if they come to power.
Should the regional parties dominate the government, domestic politics would strongly impact India’s foreign policy. The anger of Tamil voters over events in Sri Lanka, or of Muslims over Gaza, would be reflected in the government and therefore constrain policy options. The BJP has promised a more hawkish security posture than Congress in the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, but when it was in power it conducted itself remarkably similarly to its rival, initiating a peace process with Pakistan.
RSS