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The dharma of coalitions

At the now famous Pachmarhi conclave, the Congress officially decided that it would set its face against alliances. A few months later, Sonia Gandhi led her troops into 'understandings' with Jayalalitha's All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Laloo Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal. On the whole, however, it might have been just as well had the Congress stuck to its original declaration and maintained a ''glorious isolation.''

I don't say so merely because the alliances didn't bear fruit. (The Congress won a couple of seats in Tamil Nadu and Bihar -- pathetic going given that Tamil Nadu elects thirty-nine Members of Parliament and Bihar as many as fifty-four.) No, I say so because the very concept of negotiating with peers -- ''the dharma of coalitions'' as Prime Minister Vajpayee puts it -- is alien to Sonia Gandhi. She is used to having courtiers jump when she snaps her fingers; that tactic doesn't work too well with the likes of Jayalalitha and Yadav. Small wonder, then, that the ''understanding'' before the polls has already given way to a querulous series of complaints.

But the Congress is like the Bourbons of pre-Revolution France of whom it was reported that they ''learned nothing and forgot nothing.'' And look no farther than Maharashtra for proof of that axiom.

The assembly polls in the state threw up a curious result where there were four major contenders for power -- the Shiv Sena, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress and Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party. The numbers were so evenly divided that there wouldn't be a majority even if two of the four joined hands. It had to be either three of them together, or any two with a bundle of independent MLAs thrown in.

An alliance between the Congress and the BJP was never on the cards. Fortunately or unfortunately, the two regional parties -- the Shiv Sena and the NCP -- were equally inimical against each other. Under the circumstances, the only real possibility seemed to be a Congress-NCP alliance. But this proved to be tough going?

After all, Sharad Pawar had walked out of the Congress just a few months earlier, and the two parties had spent the next three or four months throwing pails of manure on each other. So it took a week to negotiate terms. But it took just a couple of days for the mud-slinging to start.

In the days of the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance, there was only one remote-control -- Bal Thackeray. And when things soured between the two parties, senior BJP leaders could always talk to Thackeray to smooth ruffled feathers. That is just not true any longer. There are two remote-controls for the ministry in Bombay this time -- and the leaders in Delhi would love to throw them at each other!

We just had a perfect example of the bad blood between the Congress and the NCP. When Deshmukh tried to expand his ministry, the NCP talked tough. The result is that the Congress has been forced to sacrifice four of its men. One of them, Harshvardhan Patil, is known to be a Pawar-baiter. (This might be one for the Guinness Book of World Records -- the first minister to be sacked before he was allocated a portfolio!) What message do you think has gone out to all the ministers with this removal?

When the results of the Maharashtra assembly elections came out, everyone started talking about how the NCP would be broken when the Congress on the one hand and the Shiv Sena-BJP on the other started to arrange defections. That has obviously not come true; instead we are witnessing what is effectively a slap in the face for Sonia Gandhi and her coterie. Like it or not, 10, Janpath is being forced to negotiate with the hated Pawar on equal terms.

But how long will this marriage of convenience last? Chhagan Bhujbal, now the deputy chief minister, and his colleagues will threaten to bring down the ministry each time that one of the anti-Pawar contingent tries to bait the NCP president. But there is nothing to stop Pawar himself from painting Congressmen as chicken-hearts who dare not stand up to Sonia Gandhi. Judging by his interviews that process has already begun -- and there is nothing that the Congress can do about it.

Post-poll coalitions have never worked in India; the longest-lasting was a ministry in Meghalaya headed by Purno Sangma (now an NCP leader of course) which stuck the course for almost two-and-a-half years. The Congress-NCP ''understanding'' will be lucky to survive half as long.

T V R Shenoy