The UPA remains a prisoner to coalition politics. And yet, the Congress has a lot of headroom for manoeuvre because no party wants an election now
“For the Indian economy, this was a year of recovery interrupted”
– Pranab Mukherjee, opening the budget speech on March 16, 2012.
Interruption has been a recurring theme of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s second term that it so convincingly secured with a resounding people’s mandate. Parliament sessions have been constantly interrupted, corruption scandals have seized up the functioning of the executive and policymaking has been sputtering for over two years now.
Ever since it returned to office in 2009, the UPA has remained a prisoner to “coalition compulsions”, the phrase Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his colleagues frequently invoke to brush off charges of executive inertia and political arrogance. But what happened in the current budget session was unprecedented and points to the absurdity of coalition politics.
Never in the history of India has a sitting railway minister been heckled by his own party for presenting what popular consensus defined as the single most progressive policy statement in the dreary run of this government. According to sources close to Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Mamata Banerjee, the party has bullied the UPA leader Congress Party to remove Dinesh Trivedi as railway minister and appoint a loyalist in his place. Congress is believed to have bought time until Pranab Mukherjee had presented his Budget and Parliament went into recess.
Chatter in political circles suggests that the Congress Party is trying to rope in Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party (SP) as insurance in case Mamata Banerjee decides to pull the rug. That is, however, not as easy as it appears. The UPA is already supported from the outside by the SP and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). There is no guarantee that the BSP will continue its support if arch rival SP joins the government. If the TMC and BSP both withdraw support, smaller parties with single digit strength in Parliament will become crucial to the UPA’s survival. But TMC has so far maintained that it will stay the course with the alliance. After all, TMC has its own compulsions as the party ruling Bengal. Understanding TMC’s functioning also would show how irresponsible regional allies put the larger national interest in jeopardy.
“About 60 percent of the [state’s] money goes into payment of salary and pension bills. The rest into payment of interest for the loans that were taken by the previous state government, leaving no room for any development work,” says an official of the finance department.
(This story appears in the 30 March, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)