Unstable alliance

Given the contradictions in the Congress alliance, it’s perhaps no surprise that there has been delay and difficulty in finalising the shape of the government; not just the Cabinet portfolios, but its very composition.

The Congress has only 145 seats, in comparison with the 183 that the BJP had in the outgoing government. This makes the alliance leader a much weaker player than was the case in the last House, and makes the coalition less stable.

Add to this the fact that the Left parties are the swing factor: without them, the Congress-led alliance will find it difficult to cobble together a workable majority.

This explains why Sonia Gandhi and the Congress leadership have been so keen to get the Left to formally join the coalition and get committed to a common minimum programme; equally, the Left is now conscious of its power and its spokesmen have been shooting their mouths off on all manner of policy issues, sounding very much as though they are in the driver’s seat.

Having debated the matter for three days, and caused a bloodbath on the stock market, the Left has now decided that it wants power without responsibility.

That brings up some of the other contradictions that have so quickly become obvious in the calculus of the new Lok Sabha. For the fact of the matter is that, apart from its keep-the-BJP-out view, there isn’t much to bind the coalition partners together.

No one can expect ideological cohesion between Manmohan Singh as the economics point-man for the Congress, and the CPI(M). And unlike the National Democratic Alliance that has just been voted out, the Congress alliance partners are in direct conflict with each other in the states, and there is therefore a clash of interests.

The Congress and the Left are bitter rivals in West Bengal and Kerala, so they find it difficult to sup at the same table; ditto for the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in UP, where the Congress is unwilling to take the marginal position that it has accepted in Bihar and Tamil Nadu.

The BJP was able to lead a successful NDA experiment precisely because it was not in conflict with its partners at the state level — where it was, with Mayawati in the case of Uttar Pradesh, it readily tempered its ambitions for as long as the alliance held.

It doesn’t help that the DMK, with 16 members in the House, has decided that it will not join the government “for the time being”. That leaves the alliance that actually forms the government with 205 seats in a House with 543, vulnerable to every sort of pressure and prone to legislative paralysis.

The structure won’t collapse for a while, because none of the partners wants the BJP to return to power. But as the country has seen before, once internal friction starts, the external enemies are forgotten.

In short, the prospect of political instability seems a more real prospect now than on the day the election results surprised the country. The main players, able to gauge this as much as anyone else, may already have started thinking of the next round. As beginnings go, this is not very auspicious.