Janata parivar’s trait

In the general election of 1998, the Bharatiya Janata Party won 13 seats andits ally Ramakrishna Hegde’s Lok Shakti won three more, an excellentperformance given that Karnataka has only 28 seats. What happened in 1999?Lok Shakti rushed to embrace a faction of the Janata Dal, squabbles brokeout over the allocation of seats, no one person could be projected as ChiefMinister, and ultimately the Congress romped home. Change a few names hereand there, and you could be talking about Bihar six months later. The burnedchild may fear the fire, but the scorched National Democratic Alliancerushes to commit sati.

The Samata Party was the Lok Shakti of Bihar, gleefully hugging its oldJanata Dal allies, and then squabbling with them. The bickering over seatswas far more bitter and far more prolonged than in Karnataka. It wasimpossible to figure out if the National Democratic Alliance was projectingNitish Kumar, Ram Vilas Paswan, or Sushil Modi as chief minister. (For goodmeasure, Yashwant Sinha’s name was also mentioned from time to time.) Andthe result? The same National Democratic Alliance that won 41 of the 54 LokSabha seats in Bihar in 1999 has got an absolute hiding, and Laloo PrasadYadav – who couldn’t retain his own Madhepura seat six months ago – is backas head of the single largest party in the Vidhan Sabha.

Has the National Democratic Alliance – or other parties for that matter -learned anything from this mess? Such as what, you might ask?

First and foremost, coalitions are not a panacea in, of, and by themselves.I would agree with the thesis that we are in an era where only a combinationof parties can form a government. (Think about it: that is the situation inParliament and in the three largest states – Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, andMaharashtra.) But, as your chemistry master would have told you in school,you can’t dump everything in a single beaker without running a serious riskof injury.

What was the chemistry in Karnataka? The Bharatiya Janata Party had spentthe better part of five years denouncing the Janata Dal ministry in thestate as inefficient and corrupt; cuddling Chief Minister J. H. Patil on theeve of the polls simply didn’t make sense to the electorate. The combinationexploded in the faces of its makers, and that is just what they deserved.

Second, and this is a pet peeve of mine, tell the voters who you areprojecting as the chief executive – whether it is a chief minister or aprime minister. That is not an issue to be settled at leisure behind closeddoors, but a basic duty which political parties owe to the electorate.

Choose well and the tactic pays off; when voters were given a clear choicein the person of Atal Behari Vajpayee the National Democratic Alliance wonhandsome dividends. More recently, Naveen Patnaik was the undisputed winnerin Orissa and Om Prakash Chautala in Haryana. Why didn’t the NationalDemocratic Alliance follow the same strategy in Bihar?

Simple, the leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Samata Party, and theJanata Dal (U) were wrangling so much that choosing any one man would haveled to an open split. (In the event, the Samata Party did break away fromthe Janata Dal (U).) But that is a pathetic excuse, if the so-calledalliance is so fragile then it can’t really provide an effective governmentanyway. More to the point, voters are smart enough to understand what isgoing on, and proceed to vote for somebody else – a Laloo Prasad Yadav inBihar or an S. M. Krishna in Karnataka.

Third, tell the people what you mean to do with power provided that you getit. What was the National Democratic Alliance agenda in Bihar? I canappreciate the temptation of forging an anti-Laloo Prasad Yadav coalition,but then what? Go back twenty years and think of the Janata experiment; howlong did the anti-Indira Gandhi experiment last? Or the anti-Congress (I)front forged by V. P. Singh in 1989-1990, which broke up 11 months after theministry was sworn in.

These things cannot be done over-night. The two states where coalitions haveproved to be most enduring are Kerala and West Bengal. But it took literallydecades before the Left Front put together all the nuts and bolts,especially since the CPI and the CPI(M) were at loggerheads for a long time.(The longest-lasting, and arguably the best, ministry in Kerala was theCPI-Congress Achutha Menon coalition, when the CPI(M) was in the Opposition.)Coming down from generalities to specifics, I would like to make one finalsuggestion: with apologies to Virgil, "Beware of socialists bearing gifts!"The debacles in Bihar and Karnataka could have been avoided had it not beenfor the Samata Party, the Lok Shakti, and the Janata Dal (U) rushing inwhere angels fear to tread. I remember several senior leaders airily sayingthat the alliance would strengthen the National Democratic Alliance. Well,has it?

Finally, is there any silver lining for the Bharatiya Janata Party? Perhaps.It is possible that the Congress (I) shall learn nothing from its opponent’smistake – and rush to form another hasty alliance with Laloo Prasad Yadav.Th-at would just about finish what is left of India’s oldest party inIndia’s second-largest state.