Coalition Government is not a Transient Phenomenon | UPSC Mains Essay Preparation PDF Download

Coalition Government is not a Transient Phenomenon

structure

(1) Opening    —    History of Coalition government - conglomerates of ‘regional parties’.

(2) Body    —    Region and regional parties.

    —    National parties.

    —    Relationship between citizenship and nationality.

    —    The eclipse of the feudal and empire states.

    —    The pluralist model.

    —    The hegemonic model.

    —    History of nation - state.

    —    The nationalist movements of the ex-colonial countries.

    —    The Indian National Cong-ress.

(3) Closing    —    The 1996 verdict is not a fractured one and the coalition government is not a transient phenomena as are popularly pronounced.

The coalition governments led by Mr. Deve Gowda, Mr. I.K. Gujral, Atal Behari Vajapayee and Manmohan Singh are invariably described as conglomerates of 'regional parties', while the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party are referred to as 'national parties.’ Incidentally, the Constitution qualifies India as a 'Union of States'.  None of these usages accord well with accepted definitions of regions, nations or states. It is not only that these usages create enormous conceptual confusions, they are also apt to camouflage the content of the transformation that is taking place in India.

Broadly speaking, region is a geographical entity and one may distinguish between folk, instituted and denoted regions. A folk region is a meaningful territorial entity for the people who live there. Examples of folk regions in India are Bhojpur, Jammu, Mahakosal, Telengana, Vidarbha etc. Instituted regions are distinctive and discrete units limiting the extent of operation for certain functions. Thus one can speak of revenue or postal districts as regions. Denoted regions are a consequence of purposeful delimitation by scholars and census officials to seek solutions to some of the problems. One may thus speak of cultural, linguistic, caster or physical regions.

The expression region in 'regional parties' does not answer any of these descriptions. Similarly, the term national in 'national parties' simply allude to their all-India spread. Finally, the term state in 'Union of States' does not refer to sovereign states.

To clear the confusion one must unfold the relationship between citizenship and nationality. Viewed historically there are three patterns of linking citizenship and nationality. These may be referred to as hegemonic, uniformity pattern and pluralist. The hegemonic model is associated with feudal and empire states. In these polities the culture of the dominant group is reckoned as the national culture; others are accorded an inferior position within the policy.

The eclipse of the feudal and empire states and the emergence of the bourgeois state resulted in reformulation of the relationship between citizenship and nationality. The new formulation maintained that each nation must have its own state; national and political boundaries should coexist — the nation-state. There was a variant of this formulation which maintained that national identity refers to the urge to  preserve one's language, culture and custom. But this  does not necessarily imply a separate sovereign state for each nation; several nations can coexist under one political roof — the multinational state. Both these variants did exist in the bourgeois and socialist states.

The pluralist model was launched by the socialists with the hope that (a) 'non-historic' nations will not aspire for their exclusive states, or (b) they are destined to disappear, or (c) will assimilate. That is, the socialist assumption was that several 'historic' nations can and will coexist within one state; citizenship and nationality can be delinked. The problematic of socialist praxis was the hierarchisation of nations —  historic and non-historic — and inequality among historic nations. In all the socialist multinational states great nation chauvinism did emerge and contributed to the break-up of the state.

With the universal acceptance of democracy, the hegemonic model stands clearly delegitimised. The pluralist model as it was practised became a failed experiment. On the other hand, the dictum "one-nation, one-state" is abandoned even in West Europe, its birthplace. It is against this back 

ground that one should search for a viable linkage between citizenship and nationality for any polity, including India. The heterogeneity of contemporary politics thanks to constant population movements and their commitment to democracy as a value call for the rejection of the old ideal — the nation-state. In fact, citizenship was never conceptually tied to national identity.

It is true that in Europe the ideal was the nation-state. But even in Europe before 1800 the demand for political autonomy in the name of cultural distinctiveness was confined to two specific contexts. These were (a) when empires imposed or tried to impose official religions on dissenting minorities and (b) when empires attempted to increase central control through imperial administration. In the last two centuries the demands for political autonomy based on cultural specificity have increased. But only a tiny proportion of the world's distinctive religious, linguistic, and cultural grouping have formed their own states have approximated the homogeneity and commitment implied in the label "nation-state". This is in spite of the stupendous efforts at homogenisation of state populations. If so, the nation-state as an aspiration and as an ideal ought to be abandoned.

Charles Tilly after undertaking an indepth analysis of the European situation for 500 years distinguished between state-led and state-seeking nationalisms. In the case of state-led nationalism, the rulers demanded that citizens should subordinate all other interests to those of the state, which hence led to the subsequent emergence of 'nations'. In state-seeking nationalism, leaders sought to create new states which could pursue the interests of distinct populations with a specific cultural identity; nationalism created states. But there were nations and national leaderships in Europe which renounced a separate state and preferred a union within a larger polity.

Wales and Scotland were joined to England; they were not annexed. Catalonia, the second most industrialised nation of  Europe after England in the eighteenth century, did not seek a separate state. The Catalonian elite did not perceive any contradiction between maintaining a certain level of economic, political and cultural autonomy for the nation and continuation in the Spanish state. Most nations in the Indian Union did not ever aspire for their exclusive sovereign states. The point is, nations do not always seek their states; some nations consciously renounce exclusive state. Therefore  state-renouncing nationalism is an empirical fact and a conceptual possibility.

The 'nationalist' movements of the excolonial countries were explicitly political and were oriented to state building. These movements had been efforts to transform colonies into states and subjects into citizens. But at the height of the anti-imperialist struggle it was often forgotten that colonies were multinational entities. The primary objective of the anti-imperialist struggle was to liberate the colonies from the foreign political yoke and establish self-government. Understandably, though unfortunately, nation and state came to be treated as synonymous.

The India National Congress as successor to the anti-colonial movement was instantly invested with enormous legitimacy. Even its most virulent critic at that time, the Communist Party of India, suspended militant activities to provide a chance to the new 'national' government. The coincidence of this euphoria with the consensual leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru provided the fledgeling state with the required political stability in the first two decades. The state-building activity launched by the new government was instantly labelled as nation-building. Even the left which appropriately conceptualised India as a multinational state did not interrogate this conflation for fear of being stigmatised as 'anti-national', a great liability to a party which is a participant in the electoral arena. But the articulation of national aspirations got legitimised through the linguistic reorganisation of India in the 1950s. The all-India character of the Congress Party gradually started eroding.

Today there is no political party which commands support from all parts of India. Given its historical legacy the Congress still has an all-India spread but its effective presence is confined to a few pockets. The CPI too has an all-India presence, but its spread is too thin in most areas. The BJP's presence is far greater with clear majority at the centre and more than 20 states but basically three Parts of India — the Hindi belt, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The CPI-M is really effective only Kerala. Similarly, the Janta Dal's anchor-age is by and large limited to Bihar and Karnataka. The explicitly nationalistic parties stigmatised as regional parties function within their respective states. This is the case with the Dravidian parties of Tamil Nadu. The TDP of Andhra Pradesh, Trinamool Congress of Bengal, the Akali Dal of Punjab and the Shiv Sena of Maharashtra.

There are thus three types of political parties in India based on their spread. First, all-India parties. Second, multinational parties which do not have an all-India presence. Third, regional parties which are confined to their respective regions. If regional and multiregional parties succeed in effectively tackling the specific problems of their constituencies within the framework of the federal polity they are likely to improve their electoral prospects. In turn, the possibility of nurturing political parties as all-India enterprises will suffer a setback unless they attend to the specific problems of particular nations. It is no longer feasible to reinvent the successor 'nation' to the colonial state.