Join the debate

It has been a decade and more since India’s politics stepped into a new age, characterised by the frequent occurrence of minority governments among other things. But political understandings have not kept pace with the rapid shifts in political practice. Which is why a crisis like the one recently averted in Uttar Pradesh is useful for the polity. It challenges us to think more imaginatively about problems that refuse to go away with the reflexive application of the available solutions. Now that the spectre of Article 356 is mercifully no more looming as large over UP, public debate must turn to some of the more provocative questions thrown up in the fracas. In the case of a minority government, does the ‘floor test’ inevitably turn into an invitation to buy up legislators? In an interaction with The Indian Express under ‘Idea Exchange’, Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal argued that it does. He proposed that the Bommai judgement’s stipulation of the ‘floor test’ as being the sole “constitutionally ordained forum” for testing the government’s support needs to be revisited and revised.

The case can arguably be made that while the Bommai judgment did well to shift the action from Raj Bhavan/Rashtrapati Bhavan to the legislative assembly, so that the fate of a government is not held hostage to the private assessment of an individual, be it governor or president, it has left another problem unattended: what if the assembly’s presiding officer plays foul? That is, if a ruling party running a minority government is determined to buy up MLAs before a floor test and the speaker is willing to play along, what recourse does democracy have? Past experience has, in fact, shown that speakers can collude with unscrupulous governing parties and courts can take very long to pronounce upon their deeds. So, does the answer lie, as Sibal proposed, in shifting the onus of proving support to the other side — by allowing a minority government to continue until challenged by a no-confidence motion?

That may not be the only answer to the predicament of democracy in times of the minority government. We may need to search for a more expansive response — one that includes the overhaul of the institution of speaker, and of our internally undemocratic party structures. Perhaps we need to institutionalise stabilising mechanisms within coalitional governing arrangements. Let’s join the debate.