Despite its proven skills in coalition making, it seems the BJP had a secret desire to set itself on the course of winning an electoral majority for itself. The result was that both the BJP and its allies went down, each losing a substantial number of seats; the BJP lost 44 and its allies as many as 67 seats.

If we confine our view of the 2004 election to its morphological character – i.e. it being a normal election which, by involving marginal shifts in voting patterns, did not give a clear, comfortable majority to the winning coalition, nor an unambiguous mandate for policy reversals – we may miss out on the other, more interesting side of this election. It is true that every election shares some characteristics with other elections of the past or those in other democracies and, as such, could be easily docketed as a type. But pigeon-holing an election into a classificatory category gives only a quick and flat view of a complex, multi-dimensional event like the 2004 election. Further, if we are interested in an election, not only as a stand-alone event but in understanding its relationship with other aspects of the political system, it becomes necessary to view it in a larger historical and systemic context. If viewed in such a perspective, the 2004 election would appear as a momentous event in India’s electoral history, heralding significant changes in the political system.

Although the new, multiparty coalition system is now 15 years old, it entered the phase of stability only with the 1999 election. The election produced a ruling coalition enjoying a stable legislative majority that completed a full term in office. The institutionalization of the system is marked by some structural elements the coalitional system has acquired.

One, governments in the new party system, functioning through coalitions, are better placed to take bold policy decisions, something that was not so easy, strange though it may seem, for governments in the 1970s and ’80s. Even when elected by a huge majority and with over 2/3rd of seats in Parliament, the governments run by one party majority were too complacent and did not feel the pressure to perform. As against this, today’s coalitional governments are able to take major policy initiatives of a kind which the governments enjoying comfortable majority would not have dared. Some such decisions, good or bad, are nuclear testing, privatization, and policies vis-à-vis Pakistan and Kashmir. These governments could take such decisions, some of which were not considered popular, because they could harness support of many interest groups and regional and ethnic formations representing themselves through a number of parties within the government.

Without the help of parties and organized interest groups which are now a part of governance, the resentment people may feel on different issues and government policy remains segmentalised or dispersed. Their aggregation and mobilization at a larger macro-level has become difficult. Mass movements, like for example, the JP movement, appear as a politics of the past. Even mobilization on emotionally charged religious issues fails to sustain or escalate beyond a point. The coalitional parties within the government and caste-ethnic politics – a grassroot reality of the new coalitional system – often frustrate the designs of leaders of such mobilizational movements by blunting the symbols and blocking top-down communication channels that ‘national’ leaders may want to activate with the masses. It seems that mass politics is being increasingly replaced by organized politics.

Third, the degree of institutionalization the coalitional party system has attained over the last two elections (1999 and 2004), has its structural basis in the emergence and growth of several local and regional parties. These parties, for the sake of convenience, are labelled here as Third Sector Parties, on the consideration that no party in this sector is in a position to overtake in its national vote share (regardless of its official status as a ‘national’ party) either of the first two parties, i.e. the Congress and the BJP, in the foreseeable future.

Interestingly, the Congress and BJP together share a minority of total votes polled in the 2004 election. Compared to 51.2% vote for the third sector parties, the two parties leading coalitions enjoyed a vote share of 48.6%. Significantly, no unaligned party attained a double-digit score in its vote-share and no party that aligned with either of the coalitions crossed 15% of vote share. Note that BJP allies jointly scored 13.7% with the Congress allies, taken together, just about reaching a double digit of 10%.

On the other hand, the supporters of the small and territorial parties are less educated, poorer, rural-based and of lower-castes. These parties cultivate voter-loyalties directly on issues relating to everyday concerns of ordinary people. Their leaders are more accessible and also relate to people in many non-political contexts. They now increasingly link the local/regional and ethnic identities of groups of their supporters politically to their (supporters’) economic interest. All this has given a substantial social and cultural content to voter-party relationships. On the whole, the emergence and institutionalization of the third sector parties has brought the party system closer to society.

Fourth, the change in the party system has initiated a new politics of redefining and restructuring the concept of the ‘national’ and its relation to the local and the regional. In this process, the structure of the representative system is being adapted to the needs of a federal polity and a multiethnic, multicultural society.

* In ordering their collective loyalties, 67% voters give precedence to their region over the nation (only 21% give precedence to the nation and 13% had no opinion).

* 32% voters favoured dividing large states into smaller ones.

* The performance of the central government mattered to only 23% of voters in the parliamentary election.

*41% voters felt that regional/local parties would provide better government in states than national parties (29% had no opinion).

* Significant in this context of increasing regional orientation of citizens is the fact that as many as 50% voters were against voting by caste or community considerations. Nevertheless, a significant number, 38%, believe that one should vote with one’s caste.

* With the emergence and growth of local, regional and ethnic parties, the nature of political identifications of Indian citizens have also changed. Since the 1989 election, voters increasingly identify with political parties and prefer to work in politics through civil society organizations. Over 51% voters today (2004 election), identify their politics and interests with one or the other political party. This figure represents a steep rise in party identification from the pre-1989 elections.

Even more interesting is the fact that as many as 13% voters reported membership of political parties. As against 3.3% claiming membership of caste and religious organizations, as high a number as 17.3% reported membership of secular (non-caste, non-religious) organizations. This again is a much higher figure than reported in earlier, pre-1989, election surveys. It seems that the direction of shifts that occurred in political identification of citizens during the political change that took place between 1989 and 2004 was from national to regional and from caste-ethnic to civil society groups. Put differently, in the politics of the local and regional parties, the caste-community identities are now increasingly linked to interests and demands of their supporters; the caste/community categories are being steadily transmuted into ethno-class categories.

In fact, the 2004 election is a classic case of a democracy functioning through an election as a self-correcting system. This correction came in the form of restoration of secular space in Indian politics which the majoritarian Hindutva movement had considered erased. The politics of the dominant coalition that grew in the wake of the 1999 election had pushed the secularist discourse to the margins. The idea of cultural nationalism had almost begun to represent the common sense of Indian nationalism. The BJP campaign, linked to the image of a Shining India, sought to make cultural nationalism an ideology that would knit together the well-to-do and subaltern voters of the BJP into what was then seen as a more durable and expanding social support base of the BJP.

Further, the communal face of the Hindutva ideology was successfully hidden by coalitional rule in which the BJP shared not just power but social-support bases which would otherwise not have come naturally to the Hindutva party. The BJP, particularly after the Gujarat massacres had begun to appear, both in its ideology and politics, an exclusionary party for the minorities, and a patronizing, if not subordinating force, to the lower castes and classes.

It seems that the India Shining campaign was in large measure conceived to counteract the possible consequences of Gujarat on the elections. Viewed from this perspective, the ‘normality’ of the 2004 election had an abnormal underside, i.e. the effort to cultivate amnesia about Gujarat in sections of the electorate who may have been disturbed by this ugly and violent face of Hindutva. The shifts, even though small in size, became critical, producing a fairly coherent action on the part of BJP’s own voters. Those supporters of 1999 who found it difficult to accept the fact that their own party had violated the limits (maryada) of Hindutva politics in Gujarat – belonging mostly to the dalits, tribals, and lower OBCs who were attracted to the Hindutva party as they saw in its politics the possibility of their upward economic and social mobility – deserted the party in 2004. To put it differently, they had taken Hindutva at face value – as an inclusive cultural, nationalist ideology – until they saw its exclusionary politics of violence in the Gujarat massacres.

Another section of voters was attracted to the BJP not for its ideology of Hindutva, but what they saw as a party ‘with a difference’. They were particularly enamoured of Vajpayee’s leadership and the promise of economic reforms.

The data presented below show how what looked like marginal shifts which produced an ambiguous verdict and denied a clear majority to the Congress-led coalition, in fact aggregated and produced a cumulative thrust in the form of a clear and unambiguous denial of mandate to the ruling NDA coalition.

* The drubbing that the BJP got was mainly from its own supporters of 1999. A large number of 1999 BJP voters (14.1%) just did not turn up to vote for the party they had supported earlier and another 19% turned out to vote against the BJP. These losses were not adequately compensated by the overall gains that the BJP made through inter-party shifts.

* The NDA had secured 40.8% of the popular vote in 1999; this came down to 35.9%, registering a 5% swing against the BJP. The BJP on its own lost 44 seats in 2004, securing 138 seats compared to its earlier tally of 182. The BJP allies lost even more seats compared to 1999. They came down to the figure of just 51 seats in 2004 as against 114 in 1999. The NDA as a whole was reduced to 189 seats against its impressive tally of 300 in 1999 – a net loss of 111 seats.

* Considering that the BJP and its allies (the NDA) got only 33 seats less than the UPA, and the BJP only seven seats less than the Congress party, it is clear that the NDA ruling coalition was defeated primarily due to a loss of confidence and erosion of loyalties among the voters in areas that have been BJP’s conventional stronghold. It can be argued that had the BJP retained the 12 seats which it lost in Gujarat and Delhi (six in each), it would have emerged as the single largest party. Similarly, by dropping allies in Jharkhand, Haryana and some other states and by changing allies in Tamil Nadu, the BJP lost about 26 seats.

To conclude, it seems the BJP could not live down Gujarat at the 2004 polls, and the India shining antidote proved counter-productive, producing a refracted effect on its allies causing all round seat-losses. Further, the loss of its own 1999 supporters proved critical, as it prevented the party, by a small margin, from emerging as the single largest party.

It is today amusing to recall BJP leaders like Arun Jaitley and Parivar ideologues like Tarun Vijay shedding tears on public platforms and TV channels on the possible demise of the Congress party at the 2004 election. Ostensibly, their concern was the ‘health of the system’ and ‘the future of democracy’ for which they wanted a strong Congress contending the might of the BJP. The 2004 outcome, it seems, amply fulfilled their expressed wish.

Anyone who followed the campaign carefully, especially Lal Krishna Advani’s electoral speeches, realised that the not-so-secret desire of the BJP was to consolidate a coalitional system in the image of the erstwhile one-party-dominant system. Their dream of establishing political supremacy of the kind the old Congress system enjoyed, they assumed, was only an election away. This desire was also induced by the Parivar’s long term agenda of establishing the political and cultural hegemony of Hindus and making Hindutva a common sense idea of Indian nationalism. This could become a reality only if BJP were to get rid of its allies and emerge as a single party enjoying a massive and durable majority. Hindutva politics, whatever the ideological and cultural gloss the BJP leadership may give to it, has been practiced as a means of converting a religious majority into a permanent political majority.

The outcome of the next election, hopefully after the present government completes its full term, will determine whether or not the two-coalition party system will be institutionalized as a structurally integral part of India’s multicultural and federal polity. The present arrangement is marked by serious fault lines – both major parties leading their respective coalitions face declining support. If this trend continues, say for a couple of more elections, there is a real danger of disintegration of the party system and thus to the future of our democracy.

* I am grateful to Yogendra Yadav and the Lokniti team at the CSDS for sharing processed electoral survey data and analytical insights.