New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. xxiv, 480 pp., [16] pp. of plates (B&W illustrations.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-026491-8.
A succession of coalition governments held power in India between 1977 and 1979, 1989 and 1991, and 1996 and 2014. A coalition can be said to have governed since mid-2014 as well, although the Bharatiya Janata Party has a parliamentary majority that gives it a pre-eminence that no party in those earlier periods possessed. There is a very real chance that when that government’s term ends in 2019, yet another coalition will succeed it.
So to understand India’s recent political history—and the foreseeable future—we need a meticulous, nuanced analysis of power dynamics within those quite varied coalitions, and an objective assessment of their achievements and limitations. Sanjay Ruparelia has provided just that.
Crucially, he brings to his task a realistic understanding of how such episodes must be analysed. He makes it clear from the outset that these coalition governments faced tight constraints, but that despite this, opportunities existed to achieve certain important changes. Leaders within the coalitions grappled with impediments imposed by objective conditions. They undertook “gambles” in the knowledge that there is some limited “room for alternatives in history”—in the words (which Ruparelia quotes) of Fernando Henrique Cardoso who, after writing them, demonstrated the point during his eight years as Brazil’s president. The leaders of those coalitions sometimes miscalculated or bungled, or were thwarted by constraints and opponents. But they accomplished enough to leave their mark—on occasion for ill, but often for good. Rising regional parties were necessarily drawn into the coalitions, as were new social forces, and India’s democracy was deepened.
Politics and state-society relations in India are fiendishly complex topics at the best of times. But given the internal tensions that exist within any coalition, and the precarious hold on power of some of them, the complications that confront Ruparelia as he charts the tactical machinations of important actors are especially daunting. And yet he has managed to make these intelligible. His ability to avoid and correct misinterpretations, which are legion in the Indian media and some academic analyses, is impressive.
The stories that he tells are so byzantine that this text cannot be an easy read. Ruparelia tackles each episode with a fine-tooth comb, but he also provides accounts of considerable clarity—despite the often mind-boggling complexity of his material. His assessments are consistently judicious, so that this book will surely stand as the locus classicus, the essential source, for studies of coalition politics between 1977 and 2014. And if, as seems likely, coalitions re-emerge in the future, this volume will be essential for studies comparing the new with the old, even for those who challenge its arguments.
In one further respect, this book will never be surpassed. Ruparelia conducted an enormous number of interviews with key actors engaged with the coalition processes, and many of those witnesses will not survive for much longer. Indeed, a number have since passed away. So no successor study will have his rich array of sources available.
We often hear complaints that the long period of hung parliaments, and of either minority or coalition governments between 1989 and 2014, left India adrift without the decisive leadership that it needs. But those who hanker after the smack of firm government fail to recognise that this era produced two fundamentally important benefits for India’s democracy, which emerge from Ruparelia’s analysis.
First, it brought to an end the era under Indira and Rajiv Gandhi (for all but three of the years between 1971 and 1989) when abuses of prime ministerial power were rife. The subsequent period between 1989 and 2014 witnessed only a tiny number of such abuses, far fewer than India had suffered before 1989 or the United Kingdom suffered under either Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair.
Second, and as a consequence, after 1989, institutions which had been gravely damaged by assaults in that earlier era, especially under Indira Gandhi, acquired considerable power, autonomy, and independence. They included (inter alia) the courts, the presidency, parliament and its committees, the Election Commission, regulatory agencies, and the Comptroller and Auditor-General, all at the national level—plus state governments, centre-state relations, the federal system, and elected local councils. Checks and balances acquired substance, hence the decline in abuses. Politics became more open and pluralistic, and more attentive and responsive to a wider and deeper array of interests. The political process became less tidy, but key institutions and Indian democracy underwent regeneration.
Ruparelia makes it vividly apparent that, as is so often the case with important political processes, his material does not lend itself to rigorous “proofs” to which some aspire. Instead, he offers arguments of high plausibility. He also argues that the episodes he examines are so complicated that “singular theoretical paradigms” fall short, and that “temporal contingencies and complex causal chains make theoretical generalization difficult” (329). Social scientists who crave such generalizations will bemoan this, and those who cling to such paradigms will attack his analysis, but he is surely right. He makes the most of various paradigms, and his engagement with coalition theory is especially valuable. But in demonstrating their limitations, he offers us a refreshingly realistic assessment of India’s baffling, ambiguous political reality.
James Manor
University of London, London, United Kingdom
pp. 168-170