Commentary/Venu Menon

What moral logic would allow the Congress, which lost its mandate to govern, to return to office on the invitation of the President?

The country's first coalition government is now history. When it was cobbled together ten months ago, the United Front came across as a loose collection of politically antagonistic parties that lacked the adhesive to stay together long enough to stave off another general election.

The 14-member coalition did manage to prove that an unwieldy, heterogeneous, pluralistic corpus of divergent political compulsions is in fact a workable arrangement at the Centre. Deve Gowda's government did not discredit itself in office. It picked up points on the foreign policy and economic fronts. It had a measure of internal calm. Its constituents brayed, but never broke ranks.

The coalition, as it turned out, was fragile not from within but without. The lesson of Collapse '97 that central coalitions cannot survive at the mercy of 'outside' support. The formula for stability is to ensure an equal stake for all governing parties is the survival of the coalition.

The chastening thought will weigh with President Shankar Dayal Sharma as he ponders the options before him. The spectre of the indeterminate verdict of 1996 has returned to haunt Rashtrapati Bhavan.

It is a re-play of last year's scenario. The President will not want to plunge the nation into fresh elections. He has to referee a situation where no party or grouping has a decisive majority. He has to oversee the scoreboard as rival teams scrimmage to make the magic total. He has the Constitution as his guide, which raises more questions than it answers.

Then and now, there has arisen a serious need to look into the question of amending the Constitution to free the nation from the current deadlock. When the President invites the largest single party to form the government, it is incumbent on the party to satisfy the President that it enjoys majority support.

The snag is that proof of majority does not sequentially precede the Presidential invitation to form the government. The party takes the oath of office and later proves its strength in Parliament, a procedure that extends an unseated invitation to the party to resort to horse-trading to make up for the shortfall in seats.

If proving its majority is a constitutional necessity for a political party, the present system obliges the party to turn to unconstitutional means to meet that requirement.

The question of who deserves the President's invitation to form the government is open to debate. A new variable was thrown up in the last general election. The President had to choose between the largest party and the largest group of parties. Convention tilts in favour of the largest party, but the current exceptional circumstance has accorded validity to spontaneous last-minute political combinations.

Under the present Constitution, the President does not have to concern himself with the political viability of a particular combination of parties. For the purposes of his task, the claim of a majority is all he needs to go by.

Here we come up against a major infirmity in the Constitution. Should the President apply the provisions of the Constitution as mechanically as a tailor applies a maturing tape or should his responsibilities extend to assessing a political party's capability of providing a stable government?

The flip side is that a President empowered by the Constitution to invite a political party to form a government on the basis of his individual judgment could expose Rashtrapati Bhavan to the charge of partisanship. The debate is self-proliferating and inconclusive.

Even the fundamental question of what constitutes a majority in Parliament merits scrutiny. Is it the head count of MPs aligned with a particular party or the votes cast in a confidence motion? The two determinants are generally treated as synonymous though there is a qualitative difference between them. In the first case, majority is decided in fixed and definable terms -- the crystallised support of MPs forming a bloc and openly committed to a single political nomenclature.

In the second case, the majority obtained is ephemeral and surreptitious. It depends for its expression on secret balloting and cross-voting, or abstaining in defiance of the party whip or circumventing the anti-defection law. It can lead to such unsavoury scenes as the one etched in the nation's memory involving the MPs of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and their questionable support to the minority Congress government of Narasimha Rao.

The vote of confidence is at best a short term survival test that temporarily elevates the status of a minority government and perpetuates it in power. In that sense, surviving a confidence motion does not indicate a real majority, but the illusion of a majority.

The United Front got more Noes than Ayes. It failed to conjure the illusion of a majority. To prop it up, the BJP would have had to vote in support or abstain. It did neither. The BJP abetted the Congress effort to wreck the UF coalition.

The President has the option of inviting the BJP to form the government. Hindu nationalism did not draw the requisite numbers the last time around. This time too the BJP will be looking for cracks in the ranks of the United Front.

The Congress is also keen to see the UF disintegrate. Alternatively, a fresh re-alignment could see the creation of a new coalition of UF constituents, supported by or including the Congress. Sitaram Kesri's gameplan may yet come to pass.

Clearly, the options before the President are burdened by questions of political morality. What moral logic would allow the Congress, which lost its mandate to govern, to return to office on the invitation of the President?

The alternative is also morally untenable: A minority regime propped up by the Congress from outside. It has been tried and does not deserve to be tried again. The Congress expected to run the country by proxy. Deve Gowda did not allow that. He paid the price. And so did that rest of the country.

The Congress president plunged the nation in crisis. The Congress created the problem. It is also the solution to the problem. If the BJP does not form the next government, the Congress inevitably will form without or within. The alternative is another general election.

This is the bleak irony of the present deadlock. It has cast the Congress as both villain and saviour. The party lost its mandate to govern but, by leasing its numerical strength to a dependent successor regime, retained control over the governing process. The Constitution has come to the rescue of the Congress in its state of dishonour.

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