The month long ordeal which kept the country all on edge may be over. But there is no sign yet of a change in the situation which has made most people sick of being made to go through the drill of electing a new Lok Sabha every year. The fall of one unstable coalition government after another has bred only cynicism and despair which are not likely to be dispelled by the new house once it is constituted. The spectre of political instability at the Centre will continue to haunt the national scene. Such comfort as opinion polls predicting a slim majority for the National Democratic Alliance bring to the Bharatiya Janata Party is not unmixed with anxiety. Whatever its leaders may say as part of their public relations chore, they are not so daft as to miss the point that the kind of unwieldy coalition their party heads can only produce a government of shreds and patches, precisely the kind incapable of crisis management in a society beset by a hundred intractable problems which demand firm decisions. The slender margin of victory most opinion polls forecast for the NDA falls far short of what the new government would need in coping with the pressures to which it would be subjected. Resisting demands from importunate allies, particularly from those with a presence of 10 or more in the house, would require much more room for manoeuvre for the prime minister than in the past. Nor will he be able to ignore the suppressed rage among sections of the sangh parivar at the nonchalance with which the BJP had abandoned for the time all the key items of its core programme, which it once flaunted as the main badges of its identity. It may be, as some postmodernists are at pains to emphasize, that contingent and irrational factors often count for more in public life than political science makes allowance for. Yet, there is a certain dread logic about the way a badly splintered polity invariably produces a fractured electoral verdict. People voting for 24 parties, each carrying a different chip on its shoulders, do not necessarily subscribe to the cosmetic common programme which often steers clear of the problems which concern them most. The parties? primary objective is nursing their own constituencies. A larger say in Central affairs is for them a mere means to serve more limited and parochial ends. This is not to question the right of people to organize themselves at any level and back their demands with such sanctions as they can enforce so long as they abide by the rules of the democratic game. A democratic polity is of no use if it does not make adequate provision for peaceful resolution of group conflicts. But such provision cannot be allowed to take the malign form of a drift towards anarchy. This danger becomes more palpable when politics at the Centre itself turns into a means of undermining a national perspective on major policy issues whose ramifications transcend local, regional, caste and ethnic interests. Those who interpret increasing fragmentation of political life as a sign of democratic health, a much needed check on over-centralization and an opportunity for subaltern groups to make their voices heard have a strong case. Where they try to con the public is in selling the proposition that a weak Central government, permanently at odds with itself, is a great leap forward in instituting a more authentic federal system. What it institutionalizes are fuzzy electoral verdicts and hung parliaments which scoff at the idea of a clear popular mandate. The country had been told in all seriousness on several occasions in recent years by many self-styled radicals that the tail had got the mandate to wag the dog. It was no accident that those engaged in the campaign for electing the 13th Lok Sabha chose to travel light. Few carried much by way of ideological baggage. What was the point of adding to the prevailing gloom by telling the public they did not know how to go about creating enough jobs to take care of all those in search of work, where to find the money to end the power shortages or how to save those states in danger of falling into pits of bankruptcy? It was significant that the Union finance minister spoke of the new target of an annual growth rate of eight to nine per cent to an audience abroad. Someone at home, vouchsafed this happy news, might have been impertinent enough to ask where the investment on the requisite scale would come from. Why do multinationals find investment in communist China a more attractive proposition than in capitalist India? And why do the Indian comrades fight shy of investigating this mystery? Of course, Jyoti Basu is no Mao Zedong and he cannot take the liberty the great helmsman did in once dubbing as a capitalist roader the man who is the main cult figure in today?s China. In any case, this country has outgrown by now the age of innocence when it thought that transplanting at home a social system, developed under entirely different historical circumstances, was a mere matter of choice. Even those committed to outmoded philosophies know better now. They realize that the constraints on action imposed by its history and culture, its colonial inheritance, the bewildering diversity of its population and the ease with which the ideas, ideologies and institutions it borrows from others suffer all kinds of grave distortions in a situation where the relationship between a Westernized professional elite and the mass of the people is often one of mutual incomprehension, cannot be wished away. The form taken by the democratic system here is only one of the bizarre hybrids produced by the ongoing encounter between modernity and tradition. What is the point of repeating ad nauseum that coalition politics has come to stay? So has an unstable Centre, governments at loggerheads with themselves, a culture of profligacy in which austerity has become a dirty word, the habit of making promises with no resources to back these, the chaotic growth of both urban and rural slums and a breakdown of law and order in large parts of the country. Even if the NDA is charged with the responsibility of forming the new government, the BJP should be wary of celebrating its victory too soon. It ought to learn to speak in a lower key until the new government it leads has shown that it can work with greater celerity than its predecessor and has not only the grit to deal more effectively with the menacing internal security problems but also the will to mobilize enough resources at home and abroad to invest in infrastructure, attract foreign capital to develop the high-tech sector more rapidly, create far more jobs in labour intensive industries, come to the rescue of derelict states, and put its own finances in better order. The Congress, too, has no reason to feel self-righteous. It failed for a long time to realize how the dynamics of a system based on universal franchise would work in a traditional society divided by barriers of religion, caste, language and ethnicity and long inured to great inequalities of income and wealth and the tyranny involved in putting millions beyond the pale. It had to make concessions under duress to caste lobbies and was the one to take the lead in initiating a competition for giving a populist colour to national politics. Even its current rhetoric against coalition politics sounds phoney since there is not the remotest chance of its winning enough parliamentary seats to be able to form a government on its own. And even the more gullible part of the public will not buy the story that a ruling coalition in which the leading partner has to work with such egomaniacs as J. Jayalalitha, Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav, with Harkishen Singh Surjeet breathing down its neck, would be able to work with greater unity and tenacity of purpose than the one which depends on the support of such characters as Bal Thackeray, George Fernandes, M. Karunanidhi and N. Chandrababu Naidu whose first priority is safeguarding their own fiefs. Viewed against this dismal background, the search for a national consensus to deal with the big problems on an emergency basis becomes far more imperative than ever before. Such a proposition may seem quixotic in the prevailing circumstances but it is the only way to reinforce the legitimacy of the system which has been undermined by a succession of unstable governments at the Centre and induced more and more groups to question the validity of majority decisions in legislatures and have contentious issues settled in the streets or, worse still, through terror unleashed by insurgent groups which claim some victims every other day.