This morning, as India’s election result continued to sink in, it really struck me how many younger Indians have never known a coalition government at the Centre in their adult lives. If you’re below 28 (as more than half of Indians are), you’ve only seen Narendra Modi as prime minister, governing on the terms of a single party with a powerful majority.
As for the rest of us, there’s a lot we’ve forgotten, too, about the quality. In the days (or years) ahead, we’ll want to see a few things clearly – against a coming storm of corporate news bluster and propaganda, for sure.
Here are some basic, 101 thoughts about politics and governance in a coalition era.
1. The essential fact of the 2024 election is that the BJP and Modi have lost their majority.
If you followed the Election Commission website yesterday, you saw that it gives results only by individual party.
News channels were talking about NDA vs INDIA all day, and that’s likely to go on. They will persist in talking about the NDA to make it look like Modi already controls a majority, but he does not.
These alliances are real, but not rigid. Once the result is out, however, every party is autonomous, at liberty to use its numerical strength to try to form a majority (in the Lok Sabha, that’s 272) and form the government.
The BJP has lost its majority. By a lot. If its allies – mainly the Telugu Desam Party, led by Chandrababu Naidu, and the Janata Dal (United) led by Nitish Kumar – stay on board, it will be able to govern for a third term.
But here’s where it gets interesting. For the next four years, it will remain possible for alliance partners to exit, for the NDA to lose its majority, and for India to have a vote of no confidence: a test that the government still has more than 272 MPs supporting it.
This dynamic is not going away, and it is going to change the game for Modi – who has not just governed without needing allies’ support for ten years at the Centre, but also for 12 years prior to that as chief minister of Gujarat.
2. We’re going to hear this called “instability” and a “threat” to policy continuity, but guess what? That’s what checks and balances on power are.
In theory, the ultimate stable regime is full authoritarianism, or totalitarianism (in reality, these are not so stable because the absence of working democracy encourages actual rebellion). Luckily, in India, that’s not happening: Not today.
In reality, the policy ideas that have moved India’s growth (if you are a fan of this kind of capitalist growth) are ones that have persisted across governments. The most effective ideas that Modi implemented – from the GST to digital payments, and the telecom boom – were not his own, but ones initiated by the UPA or even earlier.
This is natural; ideas take time to filter through a healthy policy and legislative ecosystem, which can help to separate the good from the bad.
Also read: India Rebuffs Modi, People Want Democracy and Not Prime Ministerial Overlordship
Meanwhile, the worst decisions Modi made – such as demonetisation, or the lockdown migrant crisis – were totally unilateral, or even secretive; these were the defining acts of Modi’s single party rule. The same is true of his most unconstitutional ideas, such as electoral bonds.
If the BJP forms a coalition government this week, the party will have roughly the strength that Narasimha Rao had in parliament in 1991 – the Congress government that did most of India’s famed deregulation, under its finance minister Manmohan Singh.
The decade that followed was fairly chaotic for national politics, but steadily beneficial for the economy; and the NDA and UPA coalitions of the early 2000s oversaw the fastest growth in Indian history.
In short, Modi’s coalition should have the broad power to do what it needs to do, but not the power to do anything it wants to do.
3. A real coalition can also mean a refreshing diversity of talent and viewpoints in the cabinet – as opposed to the suffocating cult of fear and sycophancy that was the outgoing cabinet (which passed resolutions telling Modi that “destiny has chosen you”. Famous last words.)
Finally, a coalition government should be a breath of life for one most injured institutions: parliament.
Over its two terms, the Modi’s government has treated parliamentary procedure like an insult to his divine writ. We don’t even realise how bad this got, because it’s hard to care for long about parliamentary procedure. But that is how better laws get written.
Without enough MPs to pass Bills on its own, it will be harder for the BJP to undermine procedure and to use parliament as a rubber stamp
to pass unconstitutional laws (like the one creating electoral bonds) or just bad ones.
My own young adulthood and early career took place during UPA governments. I protested and opposed them quite often – and took my freedom to do that for granted – but I now look back at 2004-2014 as a good period for India’s national spirit, its institutional integrity and its potential for realising equity and justice.
It helps to have the right allies, of course, as the UPA had in its outside support from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which helped bring about a progressive and enduring Common Minimum Programme.
I wouldn’t expect any of the three from Modi 3.0 just because it’s a coalition government – but the fact that it’s a coalition could help save him, and us, from the opposite.
