Coalition—Frankenstein Personified

The biggest and ugliest of monsters unleashed by politicians and political parties in India is the politics of coalition. Coalition, according to me, is a mechanism using which politicians subvert peoples mandate to usurp power. And all in the name of saving state and country from disintegration.

Coalition politics is the single-most corrupt political practice prevailing in the world today, more so in India. I guess only Italians can claim to be more experienced in this art of governance of convenience; now we know why the Congress is leading the way. I know that politicians will immediately cite the Constitution and the Law of the land, stating that such politics is legally permissible.

It is legal is something that all of us know and we as a nation are suffering because of this legality is also something that all of us know. Sadly, I do not know if any of us citizens of this democratic country can do anything to put this coalition genie back into the bottle other than voting any one party to power.

That again is like asking for a miracle in a country where politicians and religious leaders have managed to fracture the thought processes of people to a level of great minuteness that in the 21st century when science and technology have made giant advances, we are busy dividing the nation on the basis of caste, religion, and geography.

Thanks to coalition politics, we now have hundreds of thousands of parties in the country who manage to secure a few seats each and then enter the political ring for their pound of flesh. So what we now have are governments in power that are rendered impotent by selfish individuals following different ideologies driven purely by personal greed.

Cases in point are the UPA government at the center and its predecessor the NDA. If we are to look at the working of the UPA government over the past four years, it is evident that nine of the 10 decisions taken have been motivated by the pressures of coalition and/or appeasing vote banks or whatever is left of them post all the fragmentation. That dear friends, is a sad reflection of what our political class has come to be over our 60-plus years of independence.

I know that people will cite the list of achievements since independence. To them I say, that we have managed to achieve so much in spite of political impotency is more of a tribute to the resilience and enterprise of our people than the result of government planning and political will.

Any country where a hand full of MPs elected from just two of our 28 states and 7 union territories manage to derail the plans of a government by holding it to ransom, claiming that they represent the thought process of the entire nation, is testimony of the failure of coalition politics.

I can understand people coming together to do good for the country, to take the country forward. But when political parties start coming together with the sole aim of keeping their rivals in the Opposition, then I believe that the country’s political process has failed and politicians have wronged the very voters who entrusted them with the task of nation building.

Finally, when these same political parties lose elections, they start saying things like our opponents misled the voters, which is akin to rubbing salt on the raw wounds of the electorate. The reason: politicians are directly calling voters i.e., you and me Idiots. Subverting the mandate and then calling the very people who gave that mandate Idiots can only happen in a great democracy like India.

In times like these, I am left wondering if we still are a Democracy or have we mutated into Coalicracy, an ugly breeding of Democracy and Coalition politics. I think the time has come for voters to realize the futility of giving fractured mandates. If we cannot think on those lines, then at least we need to find a way of preventing politicians from entering marriages of convenience where getting a divorce does not even require the mandatory period of separation.