Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Coalition politics is making under-the-carpet sweepers of us all

In the Rajya Sabha, Gurudas Dasgupta, the Joint Parliamentary Committee bloodhound, deliberately mutes his voice over the wholesale violation of JPC recommendations by the Indian Bank. Since his party, the Communist Party of India, is now in coalition with the Tamil Manila Congress, he has to desist. The bloodhound, therefore, becomes a cocker spaniel.

Meanwhile, his party colleague, comrade Indrajit Gupta, than whom no one has enjoyed a higher reputation in Parliament for three decades, is left stuttering by the morality of coalition politics -- he hadn't actually meant to abuse Romesh Bhandari, it was just a comradely way of saying what a nice guy the governor is... Asked in Cabinet why his Intelligence Bureau failed to discover what parleys were going on between Mayawati, Kanshi Ram and sundry knickerwallahs, Gupta was, I presume, compelled to confess that the agency had so got used to spying on him while he was out of office that they had forgotten how to spy on others.

Similarly, the Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Harkishen Surjeet thunders one day against the Budget. Next day, Sitaram Yechury, late of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (and, therefore, not entirely unlettered) translates Surjeet's statement into Econo-English in The Hindu. Based on the elementary logic lessons taught to him at JNU, Yechury then goes on to suggest that his party must move cut motions to give teeth to its disapproval. He is immediately sentenced to Siberia -- along the line he had forgotten that his party is, ahem, backing the United Front.

Such meanderings are not surprising in a party which believes the best way to deal with a 'blunder' is to compound it. Comrades Surjeet and Basu swallowed the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. They, therefore, have no great difficulty in saying that its contemporary equivalent, the Common Minimum Programme, is what the finance minister makes of it -- provided only he does so in the name of Deng Xiaoping. The finance minister, for his part, quotes Deng but not Nehru. We may expect the next budget speech to cite Newt Gingrich.

This is how far we have, all of us, fallen. When there was one-party government, democracy gave the Opposition the opportunity to speak about corruption in one voice. The politics of coalition is making under-the-carpet sweepers of us all. The finance minister can actually say ideology does not matter -- and there is no challenge to him, let alone from the pusillanimous Congress, not even from the angels of the Left.

Close on one year into this dreadful Age of Coalitions, it is becoming clear -- or at least should be -- that if we have to live with coalition into the foreseeable future, it would make more sense to put together a coalition of consistency than marriages of convenience. This means that far from downgrading ideology, the immediate national compulsion must be to enhance the importance of programmes over prospects.

The lead for this has to come from the Left. It is their 75 seats or so in the Lok Sabha, and their fiefdoms in West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala, that give them bargaining power. For the last 20 years, ever since the Emergency, the Left has used their clout for anti-Congressism. It was not an unworthy aim during a period of Congress pre-eminence. The point is whether such blind anti-Congressism continues to be relevant in the Age of Coalitions. Does the Left want to continue its search for Common Minimum Programmes with parties whom they do not have anything in common? Or should the nation's polity be realigned to pose squarely the issue of class?

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