Once again the mercurial Mamata Banerjee has prevailed. After a show of defiance — to an event she denounced as a “conspiracy” against her by the Congress, the core of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, of which her Trinamul Congress is a part, technically at least — railway minister Dinesh Trivedi, her own nominee to the Union Cabinet, has quit. However, his removal for having announced a hike in rail fares was only a part of her demand. She also insists that the proposed increase in fares and freight be “rolled back”. On this the usually indecisive Manmohan Singh government’s agony has been aggravated by the notice of the All-India Railwaymen’s Federation that its members would go on a strike if the fare-hike were reversed because without additional funds the railways would go the way of some of the airlines that are on the brink of bankruptcy.

With the Congress’ surrender to Ms Banerjee, and the swearing-in of Mukul Roy as the new railway minister, her first demand has been met, but that does not matter. How all this will pan out remains to be seen.
For, a series of crises gratuitously created by West Bengal’s chief minister, to say nothing of the Congress’ failings, has done enough damage to the UPA and Indian polity in general. As if this weren’t enough, the Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam, another ally of the Congress in the ruling combination, deeply disgruntled because of the action against its leading lights allegedly involved in the 2G spectrum scam, has chosen to “toughen” its stand on the US-backed resolution against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Commission. In cynical competition with other hardline Tamil parties, the DMK also wants this country to support the resolution in Geneva while the reality is that India just cannot vote for a resolution on human rights that is country-specific and provides for intrusive inspection by foreigners in a sovereign country’s internal affairs.
Yet, on this issue also the Congress found it expedient to give in to the DMK. The Prime Minister announced that he “felt” inclined to vote for the resolution. What he did not say was that he is expecting the US to tone down the resolution’s language.
No wonder the fear of loss of majority in the Lok Sabha is haunting the UPA and its contingency plan to meet this challenge is crystal clear. It hopes, accurately enough, that the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh Yadav would bail it out. However, anyone who thinks that the SP leader would do so without extracting a heavy price is living in a make-believe world. Nor can it be overlooked that as defence minister in I.K. Gujral’s government, Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav had virtually forced the Cabinet to impose President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh most unjustly. A major political explosion was avoided only because of the then President, K.R. Narayanan’s refusal to sign the proclamation.
The foregoing paragraphs should be adequate to justify my melancholy and the inescapable conclusion that in a day and age when coalitions are inevitable in India, coalition culture is conspicuous by its absence. Even small constituents of a coalition can hold the government to ransom.
Can this dismal, indeed dangerous, state of affairs change for the better? One devoutly wishes that it would. But if the reasonably prolonged past experience is any guide this seems a vain hope. Even a cursory glance at the march of folly over the years would substantiate this.
Whatever may have happened in the states in the post-Nehru era, at the Centre the Congress had remained in power continuously until 1977 when it suffered an ignominious defeat largely because of Indira Gandhi’s monumental mistake of imposing the Emergency two years earlier. The Janata Party that replaced her pretended to be a unified party but was, in fact, a coalition of four disparate units. In less than three years the Janata government collapsed because of dissensions resulting from the clash of ambitions of three old men with a collective age of 234 years. Indira Gandhi was back in power spectacularly. For 10 years she and her son Rajiv Gandhi ruled the country.
The second coalition period began in 1989 when Rajiv was voted out, and his former finance and defence minister V.P. Singh, who had later become the rallying point of all those opposed to Rajiv, became Prime Minister. His Janata Dal government depended for its survival on the “support from outside” of the two opposite poles of Indian political spectrum, the BJP and the Left Front. In 11 months flat V.P. Singh was out. Since no one wanted a fresh election at that juncture, the Congress installed into power V.P. Singh’s archrival, Chandra Shekhar, who lasted for precisely 120 days.
For the next five years P.V. Narasimha Rao managed to run a minority government of the Congress. For this he hasn’t got the credit he deserves, at least partly because some of his methods to sustain his government were unspeakable. The coalition era that began in 1996 looks set to continue for as long as we can foresee but without producing the kind of functioning governments that exist in democracies in Europe.
Atal Behari Vajpayee ran the motley crowd of 24 parties in his National Democratic Alliance for six years somewhat better than has been the case with the UPA. But recalcitrant allies had forced him too to “roll back” many decisions of his government. Interestingly, one of his main tormentors was Ms Banerjee. She, like the DMK patriarch M. Karunanidhi, and some others hasn’t had any compunction in joining the two coalitions bitterly opposed to each other. That’s having the best of both worlds, for you. The painful question however is whether coalitions would condemn India to permanent paralysis of governance?