It seems that Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister for the third time, is fretting about his voice in the Lok Sabha. He does not have a sore throat, but he is certainly sore in spirit.
He complained after the 18th Lok Sabha began: “Attempts were made to scuttle the voice of the Prime Minister.” In his view, that was contrary to democratic norms and traditions. His feelings, and it includes a sense of suffocation, are fairly interesting. It amounts to an admission that the task of leading the House, which is his function in Parliament, is more challenging now and very different from his past experience as a legislator and as the head of the government, when his every word underscored his unmitigated dominance over whatever number of 543 Members of the Lok Sabha had turned up on any given day, at any given hour, to hear him speak.
Being in a minority is not comfortable, when the other side is out to get you, is the bitter realisation that underlies Mr Modi’s complaint. As the leader of a minority government, the Prime Minister has just about 240 MPs to cheer him on, that is, a deficit of 60 plus voices to give him full-throated support every time he rises to speak. The contrast from 2019, when 303 voices frequently in chorus sang out “Modi. Modi”, is stark. More destabilising is the fact that the numbers on the other side, in the Opposition, have shot up to 234 representatives (of the INDIA alliance) from over two dozen parties, some of whom, like the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh with 37 MPs, has rubbed not just Yogi Adityanath’s nose in the sacred soil of Faizabad-Ayodhya, but also Mr Modi’s.
The deficit of the chorus cannot make up for the security of having cobbled together a government, that though truly a coalition, is nevertheless not Mr Modi’s own. It would be trite to point out in the present reality of head counts that the House, in a democratically elected polity, does belong to the Opposition.
When the Opposition, armed with the numbers, is working to fulfil its responsibility to its constituents, the Prime Minister’s plaintive protests reveal that a comparison to Little Bo Peep in the Mother Goose nursery rhymes may be appropriate. Something is missing and something else is going on.
The new coalition is unfamiliar, for starters. In contrast, the partners of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, are battle hardened veterans. The Congress and its leader in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, is a very different challenger today than he was in 2019. Tagging the 2024-2025 Budget as a “Kursi Bachao Budget”, carefully calibrated to pander to the coalition, Rahul Gandhi is as much holding Mr Modi to account as he is orchestrating the Opposition’s fightback.
Outmanoeuvred, the Prime Minister chose to dodge. The reality of being in a minority is seeping in and Mr Modi, unfortunately, has not acquired nor seems to have the aptitude to handle his present role, that of Leader of the House. He cannot be blamed for his inexperience in these circumstances; from 2002, when he assumed charge of Gujarat as chief minister, Mr Modi has had a weak Opposition. His skills as the Leader of the House were never tested.
The charge of purchasing support to keep himself in office is not an easy one to shrug off. How he handles it will determine the quality of the partnership that he forges with his allies.
That he is open to pressure is evident; handling that pressure for the next several years will test Mr Modi. Till now he has been a mass leader, a demagogue, who has relentlessly talked up his role in representing the majority, imbuing them with pride in their identity and achieving the greatness that was their destiny. Feeling scuttled now means that Mr Modi has yet to settle down to his job as House leader.
For starters, he has to write a coalition dharma code that covers all likely contingencies, even as he struggles to maintain balance on the three-legged stool, with the Telugu Desam on the one hand and the Janata Dal (United) on the other. After years of denying Andhra Pradesh and Bihar the funding support they sought as a special category of states, the 2024-2025 Budget announcement is the measure of how things have changed.
Now required to consider the intended and unintended consequences of decisions and action beyond the limits of the BJP’s self-interest, Mr Modi has to either invent or dig up political management skills that he has never needed before, because the compulsions of coalition stability operate outside Parliament. Whatever Mr Modi does, his idea of coalition dharma will have to cover for whatever Jagan Mohan Reddy and Tejashwi Yadav can do to needle N. Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar. That is for starters.
And then there are the issues that Mr Modi cannot ignore forever. The politics of coalition in Maharashtra and Bihar certainly demand his attention and solution over raising the reservation ceiling. In Andhra Pradesh and in Bihar, his partners are committed to including Muslims in the category deserving reservation. The linked issues are time bombs that Mr Modi has to either defuse or fail.
The crux of the matter is that coalitions have a dynamic that is not limited to the equation between the partners. There are minefields in the terrain from where the partners hail.
There is also the past. After ten years in office, Mr Modi is required to render accounts and take responsibility for his successes and his failures. Try as he might, he cannot duck taking responsibility, be it on the short- term Army recruitment “Agnipath” scheme, the supposedly temporary erasure of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood and the promises he has made on employment generation, wealth creation, equity and justice.
The gap between lived experience and the Modi monologue is beginning to show. With elections coming up soon in Maharashtra and Haryana and in Bihar next year, where political partners matter if the BJP wants to keep its hold on power, Mr Modi needs to ensure that the parties in the coalition win. That is why the BJP needs a coalition model that is not a purchase agreement among the partners of the BJP that needs to win to vindicate the machinations of 2022, and in Bihar and in Haryana, the political competence of the no-longer-invincible Modi and the BJP will be tested in many new ways.
