Many channels, more coalitions

It wasn't obvious at the time but the political landscape changed forever with the advent of channel TV and private FM. The freeing of the electronic media from government control ensures India is unlikely to ever again be ruled by a single-party government.

At first glance, the map suggests India should spawn multi-party governments. India is ethnically and culturally more diverse than the patchwork of European nations. Each European nation is ruled by a different party. Since Europeans have interests in common, those national governments reach consensus on big issues and also indulge in spats.

In India, a similar pattern with different states represented by different parties evolved in the 1980s. There is no particular reason why MPs representing diverse interests should belong to the same party. It's logical that coalitions will evolve to reflect India's diversity.

However, personality cult is one way to counter a tendency towards federalism -- vide Marshal Tito. The only effective way to perpetrate personality cults is to control the media channels that count in a semi-literate country. The Indian government did just that.

It may have been an accident of history that the Congress ended up in power post-Partition. But controlling the electronic media helped it perpetrate single-party rule. In AIR's tradition, news broadcasts always start "The Prime Minister, 'insert name here', said 'insert politically correct platitude here'." DD offers similar soundbytes coupled to the additional element of photo-ops. The opposition does not exist for AIR and DD.

But after 1993, while DD and AIR continued to offer platitudes-of-the-day, other channels gave us insights into the diets of Bollywood jailbirds and the sex-life of penguins (pebbles are the common factor). The opposition regularly rears its ugly head and expresses anti-government sentiments.

Media freedom apart, single-party government has also been eroded by the autonomy of the Election Commission. Once the EC acquired teeth and went through its IT-enabling, it became very difficult to rig elections on a grand scale.

In earlier eras, single-party government was assured, bar idiocy, because the ruling party controlled both the media and official election machinery. It took an act of breath-taking stupidity (called the Emergency) for the Congress to break its own stranglehold. It required many acts of breath-taking stupidity for the Janata Party to fritter away the 1977 mandate.

It's been 18 years since single-party rule. It is unlikely that there will ever be single-party rule again. But it is politically incorrect for politicians to acknowledge this. This is why political debates are usually divorced from reality.

Federalism is probably the only sane way forward for a continent-sized country. In the long term, the EU and India are heading towards the same place from opposite directions. The EU will eventually consist of a large number of independent countries, with a single-currency, and a parliament that debates its way to consensus on key issues. India is pretty much there already.

But until the Indian political establishment admits that coalition is not a dirty word, the processes of coalition will always be messy. There will be absurd outcomes. Two of these absurdities are currently unfolding.

In one, the future of the energy industry is being shaped. A bunch of male patricians from Bengal and Kerala hate the thought of strategic alignment with the US on the nuclear (or any other) issue. But they are also afraid of the clout that a plebian woman from the Cowbelt may wield. This push-and-pull of coalition forces will impact our electricity bills, one way or another, circa 2015.

In the other absurd situation, two brothers are having an extended turf war down in Tamil Nadu. Their cousin owns a news channel and reported their differences. Their father then sacked the cousin. Therefore, telecom spectrum allocation, policy-making and network rollouts are pushed back. So, your access to mobile broadband and 3G will be delayed.

Did Ambedkar and his army of highly-qualified clerks intend this when they framed the Constitution with its careful allocation of powers to the Centre and states? One wonders.