Another chance for a coalition

Over the last few weeks, the Karnataka elections have simply taken over the local media horizon. Candidate announcements, poll promises, rallies, prepoll surveys, political commentaries, all just kept coming. An inability to predict a winner has imbued them with a definite edginess, though. While the Congress party getting a simple or comfortable majority has seemed likely, the possibility of a hung Assembly has flickered alongside. And, the latter scenario doesn’t find many takers locally: the shabby experiences with coalition arrangements in the past haven’t let any sense of the virtues of a coalition government to surface in local political culture.

India’s multi-party system presumes a polity made up of diverse social and regional constituencies with a multiplicity of aspirations. While it is possible that a political party can strive to maximally represent the diversity of these interests all by itself, the history of political parties in India has seen numerous parties emerge to open up space for alternate political visions. In view of the immense diversity of the country, India’s multi-party system should, in fact, have made multi-party coalition governments more common.

Indeed, since the 1990s, a coalition model of government has emerged as the norm at the Centre: barring a couple of short-lived instances, this style of arrangement has lasted the entire five-year term. And, the state of Kerala has seen its government alternate between the UDF and the LDF-led coalitions, each of which is made up of over 10 political parties, for over four decades now. More recently, NCP, INC and the Shiv Sena came together to form government in Maharashtra and the Janata Dal (U) and Rashtriya Janata Dal joined hands to form the government in Bihar. In both these cases, the coalition was put together by long-standing rival parties, showing thereby the innate scope in coalitions to get parties to subordinate their individual interests to arrive at a common ground acceptable to them all.

Found in political speeches all the time, phrases like janara adesha (people’s mandate), janara ashirwada (people’s blessings) and Karnatakada janate (the people of Karnataka) hide the various social and regional coalitions in the state. Winning a majority of the seats in an election doesn’t mean that a party has the entire state behind it as these phrases would imply.

Like other Indian states, Karnataka is a cluster of various regions with diverse interests and aspirations. Other parties emerge when an existing party cannot by itself address such a diversity of political interests, making coalition arrangements necessary at times. Sharing power among multiple parties, the latter also help foster a more decentralised polity. A coalition government indeed does better in a milieu of a well-evolved culture of co-operation at all levels, among the ministers, individual legislators, party representatives in local government bodies and grassroots party workers of the coalition partners.

If the election results demand a coalition government, either the Congress or the BJP might wish to partner with the JD(S). Given its recent expression of support for a Left Front-led coalition in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, it is unlikely that the JD(S) will extend support to the BJP.

For its part, the other coalition scenario doesn’t hold straightforward appeal. The constant internal bickering in the Congress-JD(S) coalition government in 2018 and the success of the BJP in tearing down that government through engineering the defections of 17 MLAs from the coalition made for a deplorable political episode. However, in their mutual interests of reining in the BJP’s dominance in Karnataka and nourishing the hope of a strong Opposition emerging nationally ahead of the 2024 parliamentary elections, they might wish to give themselves another chance at running the government together.