Hindustan Times

Sanjay Ruparelia

On the surface, India's ninth national election was unremarkable. But a novel pattern of party competition was emerging. Fractured verdicts, hung parliaments and minority coalition governments would prevail for the next 25 years. The underpinnings and ramifications were diverse.

A nation in social, political flux

The year 1989 was a momentous one in the history of democracy. Civic opposition to Soviet rule during the “autumn of nations”, following the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall.Historic elections in Argentina, Chile and Brazil underscored the demise of dictatorships in the Southern Cone. Meetings between FW de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, subsequently released, presaged the end of apartheid in South Africa.The ninth general election in India, in comparison, was a relatively normal affair. Yet it inaugurated a new era. A novel pattern of party competition, subsequently christened the third electoral system, would gradually emerge.Fractured verdicts, hung parliaments and minority coalition governments would prevail for the next quarter-century. The underpinnings and ramifications were diverse. The states increasingly comprised the most important arenas of electoral choice. Most displayed two-party or bipolar systems. But the main contestants, the social interests they sought to represent, and the vernacular idioms they deployed in order to mobilise citizens varied across the country.Women, Dalits and Adivasis voted as often as socially privileged groups, if not more often, especially in rural settings and northern states. The relative decline of the Congress, the rise of state-based parties and the ascendance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) defined the 1990s.But deeper change was afoot too. The rising participation of historically subordinate groups brought different voices, interests and practices into the electoral arena. The politicisation of new social cleavages altered the popular discourse. It made it harder for a catch-all party such as the Congress to occupy the centre of gravity and set the terms of debate.Tight races, marginal swings and multiparty blocs would determine the balance of power. Yet the multiple dynamic transitions in play also produced a bargaining environment of unparalleled complexity. It would test the strategies, tactics and judgments of competing party leaders. These dramatic changes, which fostered many precedents in turn, compelled scholars to analyse India’s electoral politics afresh. Their contributions, especially those of the Lokniti Network, overturned many presumptions about democracy in India and beyond.<h2 style="text-align:center;">1989</h2>Unlike the single overriding issues and successive national waves that had dominated the polls since 1971, several concerns dominated the campaign in 1989. The perceived corruption, expediency and drift of the Congress under Rajiv Gandhi dominated headlines. Mounting inflation, growing communal tensions in northern India and violence in Kashmir and Punjab bred a sense of insecurity and distrust too.

The newly formed Janata Dal (JD), led by the crusading former Congress minister VP Singh, sought to rally the electorate on these grounds. In its ranks were members of several factions of the Janata Party and Lok Dal, representing the interests of the dominant middle peasantry and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and a few Congress dissidents. The party was the fulcrum of the National Front (NF), encompassing the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) in Assam, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) from Tamil Nadu, and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) from Andhra Pradesh.Demanding greater political devolution, economic resources and cultural recognition in the Union, all three parties participated in a series of conclaves in the 1980s, which sought to redress power asymmetries in centre-state relations. The reunified communist Left Front, hailing from Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal, the National Conference (NC) from Jammu and Kashmir, and the JD took part too. Indira Gandhi responded by establishing the Sarkaria Commission to explore possible reforms. Its work languished under both Congress administrations in the 1980s, which frequently depicted regional parties as anti-national forces that were threatening political stability and national unity.To dislodge the Congress, Singh had to court the communist Left and Hindu right. Given their intense mutual antagonism, it was a difficult balancing act. The shilanyas performed by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) at the disputed Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya, where Rajiv Gandhi launched his campaign, deepened the antipathy. But Singh managed to devise an understanding with each side, making seat adjustments on a state-wise basis to ensure they never shared the stage, and maximising opposition unity.The fractured verdict of 1989 produced a hung parliament, the first since independence. The Congress won close to 40% of the vote and 195 seats, the largest share of any party. Yet the outcome was a striking repudiation, given its performance in 1984, when the party captured almost 50% and over 400 seats, a tally unrivalled since independence.The JD emerged as the second-largest presence in the Lok Sabha, securing just under 18% of the vote and 143 parliamentary seats, including the majority in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Bihar. It benefitted from the rising aspirations of OBCs (the ratio of upper-caste MPs fell below 40% for the first time) and the growing Muslim anxieties over the Congress’s expedient pusillanimity.The rise of the BJP was striking. Communal mobilisation won the party almost 12% of the vote and 85 parliamentary seats, many from its traditional heartland. This was a massive jump from its miniscule tally in 1984. The Left captured 45 seats, the majority in West Bengal and a handful in the Gangetic plains, while the Bahujan Samaj Party garnered three. Despite performing well in recent assembly polls, the AGP, TDP and DMK drew a blank.Accepting the verdict, the Congress duly stepped aside. With outside support from the communist Left and Hindu right, VP Singh formed the first minority coalition government and the second non-Congress administration since independence.To some, the verdict signalled a radical possibility, bringing new actors, voices and ideas to the fore. Others feared that a political awakening of the lower castes and peripheral regions, amid accelerating processes of institutional decay, would unleash centrifugal tendencies, a million mutinies, worsening a crisis of governability. Would things fall apart? Could the centre hold? Or would anarchy be loosed upon the republic?The tenure of the seven-party National Front government was tumultuous and short-lived. The competing aspirations of Singh, Chandra Shekhar and Devi Lal fuelled political machinations, recalling the intrigues that plagued the Janata Party in the late 1970s. The social democratic promises of the JD, to promote employment, small-scale industrialisation and the right to work, housing and education, were overshadowed by the tax cuts and industrial deregulation that served its richer agricultural interests, antagonising its socialist flank and the Left. Early overtures to stabilise relations in Punjab and Kashmir quickly gave way to greater repression.Singh’s decision to bestow the Bharat Ratna on BR Ambedkar, place his portrait in parliament and declare his birthday a national holiday, recognised the politics of the Dalit bahujan. Similarly, granting cabinet berths to the AGP, TDP and DMK, and establishing the Inter-State Council and Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal, enhanced regional participation in national governance and strengthened Centre-state relations.But the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report precipitated the end. The expansion of reservations to OBCs antagonised the upper-caste and traditional Hindu bases of the BJP while exacerbating conflicts between dominant proprietary castes and OBCs in the JD. LK Advani’s rath yatra to Ayodhya fomented violence. His arrest in Bihar, ordered by the JD chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, led the BJP to withdraw its support in New Delhi. The minority Chandra Shekhar administration lasted merely a few months.<h2 style="text-align:center;">1991</h2>The campaign for the 10th general election pitted the politics of Mandal against Kamandal, sharpening the ideological cleavage between the JD, National Front and the Left vis-à-vis the BJP. The Congress again proclaimed it was the only party that could ensure political stability, only to suffer the tragic assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE. Some Congressmen held opposition politicians responsible in the ensuing panic. Others called for a national emergency. Instead, the controversial Chief Election Commissioner, TN Seshan, postponed the election by three weeks.

The result was another hung parliament and an even-more-fractured verdict than in 1989. The Congress returned as the single largest presence in the Lok Sabha, with 232 seats. Yet the party’s 36% vote share was a new low. The BJP catapulted into second place with 20% of the vote and 120 seats, gaining support from upper and intermediate castes in the Hindi belt, Maharashtra and Gujarat at the expense of the Congress and JD. Finally, the National Front won 135 seats, less than the JD alone had captured just two years earlier. In June 1991, amid an accelerating economic crisis, the Congress formed a minority government with outside support, led by Narasimha Rao.The Rao administration lasted a full parliamentary term by slowly luring enough parties to its side. Yet mounting corruption scandals, from a hawala and St Kitts forgery affair to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha pay-off case, stoked disunity within the Congress. Several units in Madhya Pradesh, UP and Tamil Nadu eventually broke away.More importantly, major events and policy changes during its tenure crystallised the lines of contestation. The introduction of structural adjustment policies in 1991, which dismantled many aspects of the permit-license raj, was the first. The reforms went furthest in the realm of trade, investment and capital markets; less far in agriculture, labour and the public sector. Liberalisation restored growth. But it exacerbated inequalities between classes, sectors and regions. Moreover, the decline of central funds pushed states to compete for private investment, deepening the process of regionalisation.Indeed, it compelled many ruling parties to play two-level games. The communist Left opposed further liberalisation in New Delhi, but pursued it in West Bengal, revealing the dilemma. Finally, liberalisation narrowed the economic policy alternatives of competing parties, encouraging parties to mobilise support along other lines. But the speed, direction and scope of further reforms was contested.The second major issue that reconfigured the polity was the challenge posed by militant Hindutva to its secular foundations. The destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, which unleashed communal violence, compelled Kalyan Singh and LK Advani, respectively chief minister of UP and parliamentary opposition leader, to resign. The BJP’s performance in the 1993-95 assembly elections, which registered a step-change in turnout, encouraged the party to seek allies. The fissures of Mandal politics, which ran from caste and region to class, furnished opportunities.The Yadavs cornered the benefits of reservations in Bihar and UP, causing the Samata Party to break away from the JD in the former and the SP-BSP coalition to break down in the latter. Seeking to project moderation in national affairs, the BJP also declared Atal Bihari Vajpayee its prime ministerial candidate. Yet the party remained committed to introducing a uniform civil code (UCC), building a Ram Mandir and abolishing Article 370, while mobilising along communal lines in various local settings. Its actions crystallised the idea of a third force vis-à-vis the Congress and the BJP.Multiple differences within the Third Front, however, prevented the coalition from forging a common manifesto and national electoral strategy during the 1996 campaign. Its leaders struck agreements in the strongholds of the National Front and the Left. But in Maharashtra and UP, its forces competed, aligning with either the SP or JD. The politics of Mandal suffered complicated internal tensions. Similarly, political disagreements divided its ranks in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Assam. The complexities of regionalisation that tested the claims of the Congress and BJP to represent the entire nation challenged the protagonists of the Third Front too.<h2 style="text-align:center;">1996</h2>The 11th general election revealed greater parliamentary fragmentation.Twenty-eight of the 208 parties that contested the polls entered the Lok Sabha. State-based parties captured more than 30% of the national vote and 140 seats, ten percentage points and 85 seat more than five years earlier. Half of its MPs were newcomers.

The Congress retained the largest vote share, at 28%. But it was a dramatic fall, caused by a backlash in large states, its worst result to date. The dispersed nature of its support, given the disproportional logic of the first-past-the-post system, yielded just 140 seats. Its allies, the AIADMK, Kerala Congress and Indian Union Muslim League, failed to score.In contrast, despite a steady vote share of 20%, the fortunes of the BJP rose dramatically thanks to its political dominance and organisational presence in the Hindi belt, which translated into 161 seats. Crucially, its electoral allies, the Shiv Sena, Samata Party and Haryana Vikas Party, captured 26 seats, giving the BJP a stronger foothold among OBCs.Finally, the parties of the Third Front collectively won 28% of the vote, securing 173 parliamentary seats. The JD remained its single largest force. But the party’s 8% vote share and 46 seats underscored continued decline. The Left won 51 seats, slightly less than in 1991, but remained imprisoned in its bastions. Instead, the regional parties, led by the TDP, DMK and breakaway Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC), made significant gains, tallying 58 seats.President Shankar Dayal Sharma surprised many by inviting Vajpayee, as leader of the largest party, to form a government. Many assumed that national power, and last-minute concessions to shelve the BJP’s most controversial proposals, would lure enough parties to cross the floor. Yet the Third Front stuck together, forcing Vajpayee to resign during a stormy confidence motion in less than a fortnight. The leaders of the rechristened United Front (UF), many of them chief ministers, asked VP Singh to lead again. Instead, he nominated the venerable CPM chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, who agreed. But the Central Committee famously refused, something Basu subsequently lamented as a historic blunder. HD Deve Gowda, the relatively unknown JD chief minister of Karnataka, a shudra from a dominant agricultural caste, became India’s 11th prime minister.The 15-party UF, supported from the outside by the Congress and CPM, set many precedents. The CPI, in contrast to the latter, joined the government. The minority ruling coalition developed a common minimum programme to guide its policies. It also established a steering committee to discuss important matters, take decisions and resolve conflicts. Lokniti surveys revealed that OBCs, Muslims and rural voters comprised a prominent section of its social base, the inverse of the BJP, which upper castes, college graduates and urban residents preferred to a significant degree.Similarly, supporters of the United Front expressed greater concern with state governments than New Delhi, felt regional parties ran them better and expressed greater loyalty to the regions, in stark contrast to supporters of the BJP. The first genuinely federal coalition government, committed to secularism and social justice in a post-Congress polity, had crystallised.Yet the UF failed to last. Its brief tenure recalled the Janata Party and National Front in several ways: clashing personal ambitions, partisan disagreements and conflicting interests caused many ructions. High-level political intrigue forced Deve Gowda to step down and IK Gujral to take his place. The JD imploded, creating Lok Shakti, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Biju Janata Dal in Karnataka, Bihar and Orissa.Contrary to expectations, however, the government advanced economic liberalisation, improved Centre-state relations and began to mend subcontinental relations in innovative ways. Indeed, unlike the internal schisms that undermined its predecessors, it was the Congress that toppled the UF on the pretext of the flawed Jain Commission report. The political entry of Sonia Gandhi convinced the party and its former dissidents that it could regain national power.<h2 style="text-align:center;">1998</h2>But the 12th general election frustrated such hopes. The Congress failed to grasp the demands of power-sharing. Its alliances with smaller parties paled in significance to its loss of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and BSP in several regions. And its traditional high-handedness cost the party dearly in West Bengal, leading Mamata Banerjee to form the Trinamool Congress.

Divergent political compulsions and disagreements over relative electoral strength pulled the UF apart. Its members cooperated in the strongholds of the AGP, TDP and the Left, where these parties’ writ ran. But tussles over seat-sharing in Tamil Nadu, UP, Bihar, Maharashtra and Rajasthan divided its ranks.&nbsp;The BJP had to balance the expectations of its ideological hardliners vis-à-vis the constraints imposed by potential coalition allies. In contrast to the Congress, however, the party deftly renewed agreements with its old partners, struck a pact with the AIADMK and smaller allies, and wooed recent offshoots from the Congress and JD. Crucially, the agenda of the newly christened National Democratic Alliance (NDA) promised to shelve the BJP’s controversial proposals regarding the UCC, Ram Mandir and Article 370.&nbsp;The final verdict produced the fourth hung parliament in a row. Fewer parties, 176, contested the polls. But a greater number, 39, entered parliament. The total vote share and seat tally of state-based parties rose to 32% and 156 seats, an upward trend that peaked in 2004.&nbsp;The BJP vote share rose to 25%, while its seat tally reached 179, new heights on both counts. Its partners, securing an additional 12% and 72 seats, brought the tally of the NDA to 251.&nbsp;Significantly, the BJP played second fiddle to its newest allies in the east and south, helping the party acquire greater support among Muslims and Dalits in turn.&nbsp;In contrast, the Congress suffered terrible losses, its 26% vote share garnering just 141 seats. Similarly, the remnants of the UF captured just 22%, which yielded a mere 97 seats. The only constituent to improve its standing was the SP. The Left lost many seats. And the JD survived in only six, an ignominious collapse. The performance of its latest offshoots, the BJD, RJD and Lok Shakti, explained its diminished presence to a great extent. Finally, the DMK-TMC combine imploded, from 37 seats to 9, while the AGP completely blanked.&nbsp;Having marshalled the support of 251 MPs, President KR Narayanan invited the BJP-led NDA to form a government and test its strength in a fortnight. The Left called upon the UF to extend outside support to the Congress instead. Several members agreed. But the TDP chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu, fearing the rise of the BJP in Andhra Pradesh and sensing political opportunity, joined the NDA.&nbsp;The complex regional dynamics of the third electoral system, which propelled the rise of many state-based parties, ironically sowed the demise of the UF. It also compelled national parties to share power deftly and navigate a new political reality. The BJP grasped its imperatives more swiftly than the Congress.&nbsp;(Sanjay Ruparelia is the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University, visiting fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, South Africa, and visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University)The views expressed are personal