Running a coalition government is by no means an easy task. Far from it, it becomes all the more cumbersome if no constituent in a multi-party regime has a majority of its own in Parliament or state legislatures.
As many seasoned leaders, right from Charan Singh and Chandrashekhar to I K Gujaral, H D Deve Gowda and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, have realised in the past, political acumen and experience count for nothing if any coalition consists of power-hungry allies with vaulting ambitions and inflated egos.
Since ambition and ego are intrinsic to the DNA of an average Indian politician, the ruling coalition governments invariably degenerate into the proverbial theatre of the absurd performed by ‘unlike-minded’ entities pursuing antithetical agendas. Even the common minimum programme (CMP), their avowed manifesto of unity, fails to bind them together for long owing to internal struggles over power and pelf at their disposal.
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But some leaders have managed to navigate their boats through choppy waters of coalition-era politics. Nitish Kumar, for one, has had a smooth sail in running successive coalition governments. After winning the 2005 assembly polls, the Bihar Chief minister shared power with the Bharatiya Janata Party for seven-and-a-half years without any major hiccup. And he has been heading a three-party coalition government consisting of the Janata Dal-United, Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress, for a little over one year now.
It is not as though Nitish has not had his share of problems with his partners. Less than six months after assuming power in November 5, he had to face barbs of many BJP MLAs when they accused him of having adopted an autocratic style of functioning. But he chose to deal with the issue with an iron hand, making it clear that he was ready to step down if the legislators were not happy with him. It came as a surprise since many of his predecessors had often gone out of their way to mollify their MLAs to cling on to power.
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In doing so, Nitish made it clear in no uncertain terms that he would not allow his erstwhile ally to get away with any arm-twisting method for the sake of his government’s survival. And when he realised, in the middle of 2013, that his vociferous suggestions to not project Narendra Modi, the erstwhile chief minister, as the prime ministerial face of their coalition ahead of the last Lok Sabha elections cut no ice with the BJP, he stormed out of the alliance, lock, stock and barrel, leaving the fate of his government hanging by a thread.
All the same, skeptics doubted if the JD-U leader would keep similar devil-may-care attitude when he took oath as the Chief minister of the Grand Alliance government on November 20 last year. Since RJD had emerged as the largest party in the state assembly post 2015 Bihar polls, political commentators expected him to let Lalu call the shots. In fact, the release of incarcerated RJD legislator Raj Ballabh Yadav and former party MP Mohammad Shahabuddin on bail in the past few months did put his claims of good governance under a scanner, prompting his detractors to insinuate that he had kowtowed to Lalu’s diktats. But he handled the tricky issues well to let the state government move the Supreme Court for cancellation of their bails granted by the Patna High Court.
In recent days, Nitish’s stand over demonetisation has also been at variance with the stance taken by RJD and the Congress on the issue. He has backed Modi to the hilt even though Lalu and the Congress have had strong reservations over the efficacy of the Centre’s move. Still, he has not budged from his stand even though his alliance partners have taken the Modi government to task accusing him of having caused inconvenience to the common man.
It is, of course, not an easy decision for the head of any coalition government to take a stand so diametrically opposed to that of his alliance partners on any contentious issue but the Bihar Chief minister appears to have realised that toeing all the lines drawn by them is no guarantee to the survival of his government. As a matter of fact, it could even make them far more ambitious.
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Nitish, of course, has been part of the coalition governments headed by Atal Bihari Vajapyee at the Centre. He has also seen the fate of different non-Congress governments headed by the Deve Gowda and Gujral in the 1990s. He apparently knows that he will be reduced to the status of a titular head of his government if he lets his allies to dictate terms. He, therefore, refrains from handing over a carte blanche to any of his allies, howsoever mighty in terms of their numerical strength in the state legislature.
This ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ template is what Nitish appears to have put together for ensuring the success of coalition governments in Bihar in the past 11 years. Lalu needs to come to terms with what the BJP learnt the hard way in the Chief minister’s previous term.
