After the massive mandate it has received, the BJP can have the last word on nearly everything. On the other hand, a tottering Congress will now be rendered irrelevant in opposition as well
As it gets down to functioning in the coming weeks, the 16th lok Sabha is likely to exhibit very different dynamics from its immediate predecessors. In the 15th lok Sabha, the Congress-led UPA Government was in a majority but dependent on a series of smaller, State-level parties for support. The BJP had 116 seats of 543. This gave it authority over a fifth of the lower House and made it difficult for the Congress to completely bypass the BJP when it came to big-ticket legislation.
In the incoming lok Sabha, the numerical equation will be a contrast. The Congress has only 44 seats and the BJP is in a majority on its own. To pass important legislation, even constitutional amendments that may require more than a simple majority, the BJP can theoretically bypass the Congress. It is expected the Congress will only harden its hostility to Mr Narendra Modi and oppose him tooth and nail. That is why BJP parliamentary managers will inevitably choose to do deals with parties such as the AIADMK (37 seats), the Trinamool Congress (34 seats), the BJD (20 seats), the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (11 seats) and the YSR Congress (nine seats). Together these parties make up 111 seats, 2.5 times the strength of the Congress.
Of course, it challenges belief that all of these parties will always back the BJP-led Government. At different junctures, for different pieces of legislation, the BJP will need to marshal some of these parties, provide suitable carrots to the State Governments of Telangana or Tamil Nadu or West Bengal — as the case may be — and manoeuvre its way through the lok Sabha. True, there will be problems, especially with Ms Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress in the run up to the summer 2016 West Bengal Assembly election, where the BJP is expected to go on the offensive. Nevertheless the Congress capacity for blackmail — so critical for an opposition party in the coalition era — will be reduced.
Most of the parties referred to above, even if not economically to the Right, are not hostile to economic reforms. At the very least, they are transactional and can live with anything. There is a genuine chance of substantive but potentially politically controversial decisions going through. Even the ending of Coal India’s monopoly on coal mining and a break up of Coal India into daughter companies with a geographical focus — on the lines of the dismantling of AT&T in the 1980s into seven regional companies (the so-called ‘Baby Bells’) —is feasible with this sort of a parliamentary configuration.
True, the BJP and the Government remain in a minority in the Rajya Sabha. Gradually, over a two-odd year period, this deficit in the Upper House will be rectified or at least made more manageable. Even otherwise, the support of State parties that are not part of the NDA but have a hefty presence in the Rajya Sabha will be an added bonus. For the moment, the Congress will be well-placed in the Rajya Sabha but following the elections in Maharashtra, Delhi and Haryana later this year, it will begin to decline.
Conventional wisdom would suggest the BJP attempt to win over fresh parties and expand the NDA. However, this is unlikely to happen for three reasons. First, courting more parties and adding to the NDA membership list will mean promising more ministries to allied parties, which Mr Modi doesn’t want to do and doesn’t need to do (since the BJP has a majority on its own anyway).
Second, it suits several of the regional parties to keep their relationship with the BJP and the Modi-led Government ambiguous. Even at the best of times, a Naveen Patnaik or a Mamata Banerjee has little interest in providing ministerial berths in the Union Government to a party colleague, whatever the ambitions of the party colleagues themselves.
Third, both Mr Modi in Delhi/nationally and some of the State parties will be conscious of the Opposition space not being monopolised or seized by the Congress or the one regional force that will inevitably gravitate towards it, the left. The BJP will want a conglomeration of regional parties — Trinamool Congress, AIADMK, BJD and so on — to take pot-shots at the NDA Government but still pull back from the brink and cooperate in some manner. This would leave the Congress redundant, especially in the next two or three years as the party picks up the pieces.
A similar approach will no doubt strike Mr Patnaik in Odisha and Ms Banerjee in West Bengal. One of the reasons the BJD won a mammoth 20 of 21 seats in the lok Sabha election was because the BJP vote share surged and split the Opposition (non-BJD) component, reducing the Congress to a cipher. Something similar happened in West Bengal, where votes that would in the normal course have gone to the CPI(M) swerved towards the BJP instead.
In a four-way contest — or three-and-a-half way, since the Congress has a presence in two districts — the Trinamool Congress ran away with the seats and had a superlative vote-to-seat conversion rate. As the BJP gains ground in West Bengal, it is the CPI(M) that will be hurt, at least in the short run. That is why Ms Banerjee will be expected to keep up her anti-BJP, anti-Modi rhetoric, especially as the Assembly election nears. She will want to marginalise the CPI(M) in West Bengal and keep the Congress weak nationally. For both of these, she needs the BJP to be effective, even as she abuses it.
In the longer run, such crafty gaming of the political system cannot work because either the BJP will become too much of a force in West Bengal (or Odisha) or it will lose the Opposition space in those States to other parties (the CPI-M, the Congress or some new entity). In the near future, however, such an operative mechanism is very possible and may give Mr Modi more comfort in the Houses of Parliament than has been available to other post-1991 Prime Ministers.