What Karnataka Politics Tells Us About Indian Democracy

The fate of the Congress-JD(S) government in Karnataka will be decided on Thursday as it faces a trust vote. The Supreme Court, in its interim order, ruled that the rebel MLAs cannot be forced to attend the assembly sitting and that the Speaker was free to decide on the resignations of the legislators. What does this mean for the HD Kumaraswamy-led government?

The Congress-JD(S) government is in a minority looking at the numbers and the Bharatiya Janata Party enjoys a numerical advantage, Krishna Prasad, former editor-in-chief of Outlook, said, adding that there is no “political morality” left in the BJP and even if the party forms the government, it will be “riding a tiger”.

“This is the sixth attempt by the BJP to dislodge the Congress-JD(S) government. It has engineered an absolute subversion of democracy by whipping away these MLAs to Mumbai in their own aircraft in a hotel owned by one of their own members,” Prasad said. “The picture is sad and tragic. This is naked lust for power and the BJP is playing with fire.”

National Institute of Advanced Studies Professor Narendra Pani, however, considers this democratic. “This kind of politics is a massive decentralisation of power right down to the constituency level,” Pani said, adding that MLAs today are powerful and they use this power to bargain between national parties.

This, he said, reduces politics to the constituency level and is in some sense democratic. “There is no established mechanism through which these fairly powerful local leaders can be absorbed into national parties. We don’t have a mechanism to get them to fall in line with commitments to a larger state cause. The politics is now about what you can give to my constituencies.”

Pani said whichever way the Speaker rules, the matter will end up going to the Supreme Court.

Watch the full discussion here: