One of the poll bugles of the Bhartiya Janta Party in the 2014 elections was to urge the people of India to elect a strong and decisive government, and the voters did respond by giving a humongous mandate to the NDA in which BJP alone had an absolute majority, which meant it had crossed the magic number of 272 on its own.The National Democratic Alliance, a coalition government, took the reigns of the country, but eventually, it was BJP which was running the show, considering the huge mandate it had got. The last five years of the Modi government have comfortably broken the myth that single party governments are strong and decisive. In fact, it’s proved that they end up becoming authoritative and dictatorial regimes and we have seen many glimpses of that in the past five years.
Be it the implementation of policy measures like Demonetisation and GST, which are anti-poor, or the arrest of activists who work for the tribals and the poor, branding them ‘urban-naxals’. In fact, today the majority of our country is anti-national as per the current so-called strong and decisive regime, and recently anybody who called for peace and said no to war with Pakistan was also termed ‘anti-national’. Since, I said no to war and asked the government to introspect the security lapses in Pulwama, leading to the martyrdom of our soldiers, I was also branded as an anti-national by an army of paid social-media trolls.
What started as an NDA government, ended up becoming a two-man show of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah. Even leaders in the BJP lost their voice and veteran leaders like LK Advani, Yashwant Sinha, Murli Manohar Joshi were set aside. If this was the fate of the leaders of the ruling coalition, then the misery of the opposition in making its voice heard and playing the role of a vigilant opposition is quite understandable.
All of this could happen because we had a so-called strong and decisive government at the centre. I am sorry but the last five years have revealed that we do NOT need a strong and decisive government in the centre; what we need is an inclusive and progressive government. In a country of 130 crore people with diverse religions, languages, cultures, and values, a single party government fails miserably because it tends to homogenise our diversity and that happens because of the lack of representation in the Parliament of people from diverse groups.
To preserve this diversity, it is imperative that India is led by a coalition government with representations across religious, caste, linguistic and cultural lines. It is only then that anti-poor measures like demonetisation will be challenged and stopped instead of being dictatorially imposed upon us.
Finally and most importantly, a coalition government also checks the uncontrolled violence by majoritarian groups instead of giving them a free hand like in the current regime.
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