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Sub-optimal alliances, wide open race

The outcome of this election will be determined not so much by pre-poll but by post-poll alliances, says Yogendra Yadav

The media spotlight over the last few weeks has been focussed on electoral alliances — or the lack of it — at the national and State-levels, and their implications for the electoral outcome. However, not much space has been devoted to the two big questions: Why have the three leading contenders for power — the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Third Front — ended up with ‘sub-optimal’ allia nces in this election? And what does this mean for democracy?

A quick look at the numbers is enough to see what ‘sub-optimal’ means here. Let us define the number of seats an alliance is ‘effectively contesting’ as the number of seats which the alliance partners either won or came second in.

By this definition, the NDA effectively contested 434 Lok Sabha seats (271 by the BJP, and 163 by its allies) in 2004. This time, the BJP has lost major allies in the Trinamool Congress (TMC), the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), while gaining smaller allies in the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP), the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD). That brings the total number of seats the NDA is effectively contesting this time down to 356, with allies at 86.

If the NDA is to be in the reckoning for power, it needs a strike rate upwards of 60 per cent (or it has to win a good number of seats where it was not among the top two last time). The BJP strategists will try hard to convince you that this loss is only temporary, that ex-allies like the TDP, AIADMK and BJD would prefer it in a post poll scenario. But that is at best a hope.

The Congress and its allies (they were not the UPA then) were either first or second in 425 seats in 2004; 110 were contested by the allies. If the Congress was serious about sealing this election, it could have gone for a pre-poll pact with the TMC, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and possibly the Janata Dal (Secular) and pushed this number close to 500. Instead, it has lost existing allies like the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP) and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM). Winning over the TMC cannot compensate for this.

No strategy

Effectively, the Congress and its pre-poll allies will contest only 390 seats, much less than they need to. Congressmen tend to present this failure as a grand strategy to resurrect the party. But what was the need for protracted negotiations with the likes of Amar Singh if the party was working according to a plan?

The difficulty with doing any count for the Third Front is that it is hard to know who is in and who is out on any given day.

In 2004, candidates and parties other than the BJP and the Congress secured more than 50 per cent of the votes in the country and won just a little less than a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha. It takes no great political calculation to see that if the non-Congress, non-BJP parties come together, they would form the single largest political bloc.

Yet it stretches political credulity that this will actually happen. Notwithstanding the claims of Third Front optimists, the possibility of the constituents even partially coming together after May 16 is slim. Unless, of course, both the NDA and the UPA fall short of the 200 mark and force a unity among the rest.

Clearly, this sub-optimality is not by design. Media reports have drawn attention to the murky deals, the intricate calculations, the motives of the main players and the skills of the negotiators in the calculus of alliances. It is tempting to conclude that the alliances failed because the negotiators were not skilled, because the big partners were not accommodating, because the small ones were over-ambitious and so on.

Larger question

But that does not answer the larger question: why did this happen on such a large scale in this election? Why did these parties that have known each other for so long and have shared power turn distrustful? We need to look for something bigger here. I suspect that the inability of the three main contenders to make and sustain alliances is because they are yet to come to terms with the logic of democracy.

Although we pride in calling ourselves the largest democracy, we do not quite realise the implications of being a large democracy in such a diverse country. The sheer size and diversity of the country requires, above all, that political power is coalitional in nature. Power has to be shared in social and political terms. This could take the form of a formal coalition among different political parties. Or it could take the form of a political party that is itself is a coalition, as the Congress was in its heyday.

The shrinking of the NDA is a direct consequence of its refusal to accept the logic of diversity in a democracy. It is true that none of the NDA allies quit in response to the Gujarat massacres in 2002. But immediately after their defeat in 2004, Mamata Banerjee and Chandrababu Naidu blamed the BJP for damaging their support base among the Muslim community. Similar considerations were at work in Tamil Nadu and Orissa, and may come to the fore in Bihar. The self-corrective mechanisms of democracy worked not through high principle but through petty electoral calculus.

In the case of the UPA, the problem is a reluctance to share power with other parties. The Congress accepted a coalitional strategy under duress, but is not quite reconciled to it. The party still dreams of a country where the ‘problem’ of regional parties will disappear. The Congress sought to substitute real power sharing with allies by sharing the spoils of power with their ministers.

The Third Front has no ideological or practical problems with diversity; but the constituents mistake separateness for diversity. Each of the Third Front parties follows a separate agenda. As elections are State-specific, they have little to contribute to one another. Occasionally, they try to staple together these different agendas and pass it off as a national agenda. They do not offer an integral vision of a diverse India.

Whether by design or by default, sub-optimal alliances have a major consequence: they make government formation dependent on post-poll alliances.

The outcome of the 2009 election will be determined by the ‘sixth phase’ of polling after May 16. The problem with post-poll alliances is that they leave the people out. Pre-poll alliances give voters a chance to reject or endorse them.

But with post-poll alliances, the ball is in the court of middlemen. In a democracy, sub-optimal alliances are always a sub-optimal option for the people.

[Yogendra Yadav is a Senior Fellow at CSDS and the

Editor of Samayik Varta. yogendra.election@gmail.com]

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