Politics in India since Independence a coalition government from May to June and was re-elected in October . Atal Behari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister during both these NDA governments and his government formed in completed its full term. Thus, with the elections of , a long phase of coalition politics began in India. Since then, there have been eleven governments at the Centre, all of which have either been coalition governments or minority governments supported by other parties, which did not join the government.
In this new phase, any government could be formed only with the participation or support of many regional parties. This applied to the National Front in , the United Front in and , the BJP-led coalition in , the NDA in , the UPA in and . However, this trend changed in . Let us connect this development with what we have learnt so far.
The era of coalition governments may be seen as a long-term trend resulting from relatively silent changes that were taking place over the last few decades. We saw in chapter two that in earlier times, it was the Congress party itself that was a ‘coalition’ of different interests and different social strata and groups. This gave rise to the term ‘Congress system’. A cartoonist’s depiction of the change from one-party dominance to a multi-party alliance system.
Credit: Ajit Ninan/India Today