The RSS talks with Jamiat leaders: Najeeb Jung

 

Coalition governments have outperformed single party rule

TCA Sharad Raghavan in The Print

The perception that coalition governments are prone to going slow on reforms and see slower economic growth is not borne out by the data, an analysis by ThePrint has shown.

In fact, gross domestic product (GDP) in aggregate and within key sectors of the economy averaged faster growth during the coalition government periods of 1990-2014 than in the stable, single-party-majority periods that preceded or followed this phase.

Further, analysis shows that this coalition phase also saw a number of reforms that spanned sectors and that had profound impacts on the economic progress of the country.


 

The issue of coalition versus single-party-led governments has again come to the fore since the Bharatiya Janata Party — which formed the majority in the Lok Sabha from 2014 to 2024 — failed to reach the majority mark in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. With 240 seats, the BJP will need to rely on a coalition with its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) partners to form the government.

Following these results, a few ratings agencies issued comments about how a coalition government would result in delays in key reforms.

Christian de Guzman, Senior Vice-President at Moody’s Ratings, for example, said that the NDA’s “relatively slim margin of victory, as well as the BJP’s loss of its outright majority in parliament, may delay more far-reaching economic and fiscal reforms”.

Fitch, for its part, said that the return of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a weakened majority “could pose challenges for the more ambitious elements of the government’s reform agenda”.

The analysis of the coalition period in India’s history, however, shows these fears may be unfounded.


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Stronger economic growth

India saw its first phase of political stability at the Centre — defined as a single party forming the majority — between 1952 and 1989, when the Congress itself formed the government for around 90 percent of this period.

This phase, however, saw India’s GDP growing at a compounded average rate of growth (CAGR) of just 4 percent — derisively called the ‘Hindu rate of growth’. The CAGR is the rate at which the economy would have to grow every year since 1952 to reach the level it was at in 1989.

The next phase, of coalition governments, spanned the period 1989 to 2014. This 25-year period saw as many as eight prime ministers (counting Atal Bihari Vajpayee twice for his two separate terms), and as many governments coming to power. Each was formed on the basis of a coalition.

This shaky phase at the Centre, however, saw GDP growth accelerate to 5.8 percent compounded annually. Further, a sectoral breakup also shows that this faster growth was spread across key sectors of the economy rather than being driven by just a few.

The agriculture sector and mining sectors, for example, grew an average of 2.7 percent during the first stable phase, and accelerated to 3 percent during the coalition phase. Similarly, the industrial sector — comprising manufacturing, construction, and utilities — saw growth speeding up from 5.3 percent to 6.4 percent over these two periods.

The key services sectors such as trade, hotels, transport, communication, financing, real estate, professional services, and public administration all saw growth quicken during the coalition period.

Growth slows again, dragged by pandemic

The next phase of stability came with the historic victory of the BJP in 2014, having secured a single-party majority with 282 seats in the Lok Sabha. It returned to power in 2019 with an even larger majority of 303 seats.

This decade, however, saw average growth slowing to 5.1 percent, although this was heavily influenced by the 5.8 percent contraction in GDP in the COVID-19 pandemic-impacted year of 2020-21. That said, the first period of stability also saw such an outlier year, when GDP contracted 5.2 percent in 1979-80.

Apart from agriculture, which continued to accelerate under the Modi government, all other sectors of the economy saw slower average growth in the 2014-24 period than in the preceding 25 years.
Coalitions have been reforms-focused too

The coalition government under Narasimha Rao during the period from 1991 to 1996 is remembered primarily for the scope of economic reforms implemented during its tenure.

These include the dismantling of the ‘licence raj’, the opening up of the economy to the private sector and global investment and competition, and providing banks the freedom to determine their own interest rates, among other wide-reaching reforms.

The H.D. Deve Gowda-led coalition in 1996-97 saw then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram present what is now called the ‘dream budget’ in which he slashed the marginal income tax rate for individuals, cut corporate tax rates, reduced peak customs duties, and introduced the Voluntary Disclosure of Income Scheme (VDIS) aimed at curbing black money.

Next came the first government of the NDA under PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, spanning 1999 to 2004. This government saw the groundwork laid for the ambitious golden quadrilateral highway project, the introduction of the National Telecom Policy, which ended government monopoly over the sector, raised foreign direct investment limits in banking and insurance, and put in place the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, the provisions of which are largely followed even today.

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), in power from 2004 to 2014, rolled out the Value Added Tax (VAT) — the precursor to the Goods and Services Tax (GST) — across the country. The price of petrol was deregulated in 2010, allowing it to be linked to the market price of oil.

Several rights-based reforms were also introduced during this period, including the Right to Information (RTI), the Right to Food, and the Right to Education.

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Kashmir police published “survival tips” for nuclear war - Arundhati Roy's rebuttal to Praveen Swami

Does Your Bomb-Proof Basement Have An Attached Toilet?

An execution carried out to thundering war clouds

ARUNDHATI ROY 

What are the political consequences of the secret and sudden hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, prime accused in the 2001 Parliament attack, going to be? Does anybody know? The memo, in callous bureaucratese, with every name insultingly misspelt, sent by the Superintendent of Central Jail No. 3, Tihar, New Delhi, to “Mrs Tabassum w/o Sh Afjal Guru” reads:

“The mercy petition of Sh Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been rejected by Hon’ble President of India. Hence the execution of Mohd Afjal Guru s/o Habibillah has been fixed for 09/02/2013 at 8 am in Central Jail No-3.
This is for your information and for further necessary action.”

The mailing of the memo was deliberately timed to get to Tabassum only after the execution, denying her one last legal chanc­e—the right to challenge the rejection of the mercy petition. Both Afzal and his family, separately, had that right. Both were thwarted. Even though it is mandat­ory in law, the memo to Tabassum ascribed no reason for the president’s rejection of the mercy petition. If no reason is given, on what basis do you appeal? All the other prisoners on death row in India have been given that last chance.

Since Tabassum was not allowed to meet her husband before he was hanged, since her son was not allowed to get a few last words of advice from his father, since she was not given his body to bury, and since there can be no funeral, what “further necessary action” does the jail manual prescribe? Anger? Wild, irreparable grief? Unquestioning acc­eptance? Complete integration?

After the hanging, there have been unseemly celebrations. The bereaved wives of the people who were killed in the attack on Parliament were displayed on TV, with M.S. Bitta, chairman of the All-India Anti-Terrorist Front, and his ferocious moustaches playing the CEO of their sad little company. Will anybody tell them that the men who shot their husbands were killed at the same time, in the same place? And that those who planned the attack will never be brought to justice because we still don’t know who they are.

India has displayed a touching belief in the testimony of a former chief of the ISI, of which the mandate has been to destabilise India.

Meanwhile, Kashmir is under curfew, once again. Its people have been locked down like cattle in a pen, once again. They have defied curfew, once again. Three people have already been killed in three days and fifteen more grievou­sly injured. Newspapers have been shut down, but anybody who trawls the internet will see that this time the rage of young Kashmiris is not defiant and exuberant like it was during the mass uprisings in the summers of 2008, 2009 and 2010­—even though 180 people lost their lives on those occasions. This time the anger is cold and corrosive. Unforgiving. Is there any reason why it shouldn’t be?

For more than 20 years, Kashmiris have endured a military occupation. The tens of thousands who lost their lives were killed in prisons, in torture centres, and in ‘encounters’, genuine as well as fake. What sets the execution of Afzal Guru apart is that it has given the young, who have never had any first-hand experience of democracy, a ringside seat to watch the full majesty of Indian democracy at work. They have watched the wheels turning, they have seen all its hoary institutions, the government, police, courts, political parties and yes, the media, collude to hang a man, a Kashmiri, who they do not believe received a fair trial. With good reason.

He went virtually unrepresented in the lower court during the most crucial part of the trial. The court-appointed lawyer never visited him in prison, and actually admitted incriminating evidence against his own client.  (The Supreme Court deliberated on that matter and decided it was okay.) In short, his guilt was by no means established beyond reasonable doubt. They have watched the government pull him out of the death row queue and execute him out of turn. What direction, what form will their new cold, corrosive anger take? Will it lead them to the blessed liberation they so yearn for and have sacrificed a whole generation for, or will it lead to yet another cycle of cataclysmic violence, of being beaten down, and then having ‘normalcy’ imposed on them under soldiers’ boots?

Afzal Guru family weren’t given the President’s reasons for rejecting his mercy plea. (Photograph by Getty Images, From Outlook 25 February 2013)

All of us who live in the region know that 2014 is going to be a watershed year. There will be elections in Pakistan, in India and in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. We know that when the US withdraws its troops from Afghanistan, the chaos from an already seriously destabilised Pakistan will spill into Kashmir, as it has done before. By executing Afzal Guru in the way that it did, the government of India has taken a decision to fuel that process of destabilisation, to actually invite it in. (As it did before, by rigging the 1987 elections in Kashmir.) After three consecutive years of mass protests in the Valley ended in 2010, the government invested a great deal in restoring its version of ‘norma­lcy’ (happy tourists, voting Kashmiris). The question is, why was it willing to reverse all its own efforts? Leaving aside issues of the legality, the morality and the venality of executing Afzal Guru in the way that it did, and looking at it just politically, tactically, it is a dangerous and irresponsible thing to have done. But it was done. Clearly, and knowingly. Why?

I used the word ‘irresponsible’ advisedly. Look what happened the last time around.

Kashmiri youth have seen Indian democracy at work now, and believe its institutions have sent a man to the gallows without a fair trial.

In 2001, within a week of the Parliament attack (and a few days after Afzal Guru’s arrest), the government recalled its ambassador from Pakistan and dispatched half a million troops to the border. On what basis was that done? The only thing the public was told is that while Afzal Guru was in the custody of the Delhi Police Special Cell, he had admitted to being a member of the Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). The Supreme Court set aside that ‘confession’ extracted in police custody as inadmissible in law. Does what is inadmissible in law become admissible in war?

In its final judgement on the case, apart from the now famous statements about “satisfying collective conscience” and having no direct evidence, the Supreme Court also said there was “no evidence that Mohammed Afzal belonged to any terrorist group or organisation”. So what justified that military aggression, that loss of soldiers’ lives, that massive haemorrhaging of public money and the real risk of nuclear war? (Remember foreign embassies issued travel advisories and evacuated their staff?) Was there some intelligence that preceded the Parliament attack and the arrest of Afzal Guru that we had not been told about? If so, how could the attack be allowed to happen? And if the intelligence was accurate, and infallible enough to justify such dangerous military posturing, don’t people in India, Pakistan and Kashmir have the right to know what it was? Why was that evidence not produced in court to establish Afzal Guru’s guilt?

In the endless debates around the Parliament attack case, on this, perhaps the most crucial issue of all, there has been dead silence from all quarters—leftists, rightists, Hindutva-ists, secularists, nationalists, seditionists, cynics, critics. Why?

Maybe the JeM did mastermind the attack. Praveen Swami, perhaps the Indian media’s best known expert on ‘terrorism’, who seems to have enviable sources in the Indian police and intelligence agencies, has recently cited the 2003 testimony of former ISI chief Lt Gen Javed Ashraf Qazi, and the 2004 book by Muhammad Amir Rana, a Pakistani scholar, holding the JeM responsible for the Parliament attack. (It’s touching, this belief in the veracity of the testimony of the chief of an organisation whose mandate it is to destabilise India.) It still doesn’t explain what evidence there was in 2001, when the army mobilisation took place.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept that the JeM carried out the attack. Maybe the ISI was involved too. We needn’t pretend that the government of Pakistan is innocent of carrying out covert activity over Kashmir. (Just as the government of India does in Balochistan and parts of Pakistan. Remember the Indian army trained the Mukti Bahini in East Pakistan in the 1970s, and six different Sri Lankan Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE, in the 1980s.)

A few days back, Pakistan test-fired a nuclear missile of short range, for use on the battlefield. And Kashmir police published N-survival tips.

It’s a filthy scenario all around. What would a war with Pakistan have achieved then, and what will it achieve now? (Apart from a massive loss of life. And fattening the bank accounts of some arms dealers.) Indian hawks routinely suggest the only way to “root out the problem” is “hot pursuit” and the “taking out” of “terrorist camps” in Pakistan. Really? It would be interesting to research how many of the aggressive strategic experts and defence analysts on our TV screens have an interest in the defence and weapons industry. They don’t even need war. They just need a war-like climate in which military spending remains on an upward graph. This idea of hot pursuit is even stupider and more pathetic than it sounds. What would they bomb? A few individuals? Their barracks and food supplies? Or their ideology? Look how the US government’s “hot pursuit” has ended in Afghanistan. And look how a “security grid” of half-a-million soldiers has not been able to subdue the unarmed, civilian population of Kashmir. And India is going to cross international borders to bomb a country—with nuclear arms—that is rapidly devolving into chaos? India’s professional war-mongers derive a great deal of satisfaction by sneering at what they see as the disintegration of Pakistan. Anyone with a rudimentary, working knowledge of history and geography would know that the breakdown of Pakistan (into a gangland of crazed, nihilistic, religious zealots) is absolutely no reason for anyone to rejoice.

The US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistan’s official role as America’s junior partner in the war on terror, makes that region a much-reported place. The rest of the world is at least aware of the dangers unfolding there. Less understood, and harder to read, is the perilous wind that’s picking up speed in the world’s favourite new superpower. The Indian economy is in considerable trouble. The aggressive, acquisitive ambition that economic liberalisation unleashed in the newly created middle class is quickly turning into an equally aggressive frustration. The aircraft they were sitting in has begun to stall just after takeoff. Exhilaration is turning to panic.
The general election is due in 2014. Even without an exit poll I can tell you what the results will be. Though it may not be obvious to the naked eye, once again we will have a Congress-BJP coalition. (Two parties, each with a mass murder of thousands of people belonging to minority communities under their belts.) The CPI(M) will give support from outside, even though it hasn’t been asked to. Oh, and it will be a strong state. (On the hanging front, the gloves are already off. Could the next in line be Balwant Singh Rajoana, on death row for the assassination of Punjab’s chief minister Beant Singh? His execution could revive Khalistani sentiment in Punjab and put the Akali Dal on the mat. Perfect old-style Congress politics.)

But that old-style politics is in some difficulty. In the last few turbulent months, it is not just the image of major political parties, but politics itself, the idea of politics as we know it, that has taken a battering. Again and again, whether it’s corruption, rising prices, or rape and the rising violence against women, the new middle class is at the barricades. They can be water-cannoned or lathicharged, but can’t be shot or impriso­ned in their thousands, in the way the poor can, the way Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, Kashmiris, Nagas and Manipuris can—and have been. The old political parties know that if there is not to be a complete meltdown, this aggression has to be headed off, redirected. They know that they must work together to bring politics back to what it used to be. What better way than a communal conflagration? (How else can the secular play at being secular and the communal be communal?) Maybe even a little war, so that we can play Hawks & Doves all over again.
What better solution than to aim a kick at that tried and trusted old political football—Kashmir? The hanging of Afzal Guru, its brazenness and its timing, is deliberate. It has brought politics and anger back onto Kashmir’s streets.

The idea of ‘hot pursuit’ is stupid, pathetic. What would we bomb? Some individuals? Their barracks? Or their ideology?

India hopes to manage it with the usual combination of brute force and poisonous, Machiavellian manipulation, des­igned to pit people against one another. The war in Kashmir is presented to the world as a battle between an inclusive, secular democracy and radical Islamists. What then should we make of the fact that Mufti Bashiruddin, the so-called Grand Mufti of Kashmir (a completely phantom post)—who has made most abominable hate speeches and issued fatwa after fatwa, intended to present Kashmir as a demonic, monolithic, Wahabi society—is actually a government-anointed cleric? Kids on Facebook will be arrested, never him. What should we make of the fact that the Indian government looks away while money from Saudi Arabia (that most steadfast partner of the US) is pouring into Kashmir’s madrassas? How different is this from what the CIA did in Afghanistan all those years ago? That whole, sorry business is what created Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It has decimated Afghanistan and Pakistan. What sort of incubus will this unleash?

The trouble is that the old political football may not be all that easy to control any more. And it’s radioactive. Maybe it is not a coincidence that a few days ago Pakistan tested a short-range battlefield nuclear missile to protect itself against threats from “evolving scenarios”. Two weeks ago, the Kashmir police published “survival tips” for nuclear war. Apart from advising people to build toilet-equipped bombproof basements large enough to house their entire families for two weeks, it said: “During a nuclear attack, motorists should dive out of their cars toward the blast to save themselves from being crushed by their soon-to-be tumbling vehicles.” And to “expect some initial disorientation as the blast wave may blow down and carry away many prominent and familiar features”.

Prominent and familiar features may already have been blown down. Perhaps we should all jump out of our soon-to-be-tumbling vehicles.

This Coalition government won’t see out 2013

The best government for decades will be brought down by the inherent pitfalls of partnership.

Friends in need: it all started so well, but the Coalition is showing the strain Photo: AP

By Peter Oborne

8:02PM GMT 07 Mar 2012

221 Comments

Just after the general election, over breakfast at St Pancras Station, I had an electrifying political conversation with Mark Oaten, the former Liberal Democrat MP and home affairs spokesman. It clarified my thinking and its details have stayed with me ever since.

Mr Oaten was the author of a rather important book, which analysed both the past British history of coalition government as well as the far more extensive contemporary experience in continental Europe and Ireland.

We were having breakfast because I wanted to ask him what lessons could be learnt from past experience that would help me understand the Conservative/Lib Dem administration, which had been formed just a few days before. First of all, said Mr Oaten, coalitions are always disastrous for the smaller party. It gets swallowed up, blamed for the failures and only rarely credited with the successes, and then not nearly enough.

In some cases, as with the hapless Progressive Democrats, who never recovered from their alliance with Fianna Fáil and were dissolved in the wake of the 2007 Irish general election, the smaller party vanishes from history. But always it suffers heavy losses.

So I asked Mr Oaten whether there was any way to avoid this disaster. He shook his head sorrowfully. The best that could be hoped, he replied, was to mitigate the scale of the setback. “It is impossible,” he said, in a remark that Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, might do well to ponder, “to walk out of a ministerial car and into an election campaign. There must be a clear and decisive rupture between the coalition parties well before a general election, otherwise the smaller party will always be obliterated.”

And when should such a breach occur? Once again, Mr Oaten produced a precise and thought-provoking answer. “A danger moment comes approximately two years after the general election. That is when the coalition agreement tends to run out. At this point the parties often try to create a fresh coalition agreement. But such attempts normally fail.”

Just under two years have passed since our conversation, and nothing since suggests that Mr Oaten’s analysis was wrong. There has indeed been an attempt to create a new agreement to renew the Government two years in, and it has – as predicted – failed. Lib Dem support has slumped, just as Mr Oaten said it would: the party will be lucky to win more than a dozen seats next time.

Meanwhile, the original dynamism and sense of purpose has gone. It is important to remember that the Lib Dems and the Tories remain united on certain issues, above all the need to tackle the deficit. But on numerous others – Europe, tax, health, trade policy, family policy, constitutional reform – the two parties are polarised.

This week’s leaked letter from Vince Cable to David Cameron and Nick Clegg merely drives home a point that has been obvious for some time: the Coalition has two economic policies. One is being run by George Osborne at the Treasury, while the other is being articulated by Mr Cable. The letter does the Business Secretary credit. It is a mature meditation on Britain’s economic and industrial predicament. The assertion that the Coalition does not possess a vision for future growth is nothing less than God’s own truth. While the leak may be regrettable, it is thoroughly reassuring that letters of this calibre are passing between senior members of the Government.

Allies of the Chancellor are trying to diminish Mr Cable by pointing out that he has been responsible for business since the Coalition was formed, and that he is therefore highlighting his own failure. This is disingenuous. No trade policy is even remotely possible without the assent of the Treasury. Consider Mr Cable’s most concrete and thoughtful proposal: the break-up of RBS. It was Mr Osborne’s decision to leave the doomed conglomerate to its own devices, a stagnant weight on the British economic system, marooned in the hands of the investment banker Stephen Hester for the past two years. The fact is that Mr Cable has a reasonably worked-out and coherent grasp of political economy, whether one agrees with it or not, and Mr Osborne does not. A large number of Tories want Mr Cable out. They are very stupid. Few things would damage Tory re-election chances more gravely than the Business Secretary on the back benches in partnership with the increasingly impressive Labour leader, Ed Miliband.

Far more lethal to the Coalition, however, is House of Lords reform. With the Government due to unveil the shape of its Bill by the end of this month, it may well turn into the final battlefield upon which the Coalition will fail. Nick Clegg’s motives are understandable. The Deputy Prime Minister, who has suffered a series of pulverising reverses and humiliations, is a fairly intelligent man. He probably senses the scale of the impending electoral catastrophe and is desperate to extract something – anything! – from the rubble. An elected House of Lords, chosen through proportional representation, will guarantee that the Lib Dems hold the balance of power in the Upper House for the foreseeable future, and secure Mr Clegg some sort of political legacy.

But he must surely have been told that his proposals are doomed. They may well bite the dust in the Commons, where the ablest young Tories, led by the outstanding Jesse Norman, have already destroyed, with frightening ease, their intellectual basis. But they have no chance whatever in the House of Lords, where my inquiries have discovered that appointed peers will refuse point blank to countenance their own extinction.

Some weeks ago, Lord Steel, a former Liberal leader, suggested a solution to this problem: peers should receive lump sums as a way of easing the prospect of retirement. The logic behind this sordid and grossly improper proposal is faultless. Many of the peers who now occupy the Lords benches paid good money to get in: they would doubtless be swayed by a generous tip on the way out. But it is surely wholly unacceptable, even by today’s debased standards of public conduct, that legislators should have a financial interest in the outcome of such an important vote.

The failure of Mr Clegg’s House of Lords reforms will have major consequences. Furious Lib Dems are already plotting their revenge in the shape of pulling the plug on planned constituency boundary changes, seen by Conservative Party strategists as essential to a Tory victory at the next general election.

I write all this with sadness. Plenty of mistakes have been made since 2010, but this has nevertheless been the best government for a generation, led by men and women for the most part of decency and goodwill. Important steps have been taken towards addressing the financial deficit, while the reforms to welfare and education are essential to the health of Britain as a nation and will soon be irreversible.
It is only thanks to the skill and admirable personal forbearance of Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron that the project has lasted as long as it has. But the odds against its long-term survival are lengthening.
Expect the Coalition to break apart by 2013 at the latest, though a minority Conservative administration may linger on for a while longer. And expect that five-year fixed parliament, like Lords reform, to turn out to be another of Nick Clegg’s charming constitutional delusions.