The Congress party is plagued with corruption scandals. The BJP is no better. Those who have any doubts just need to look at the state of Karnataka politics. The BJP is universally accepted as a political front for the RSS. Most secular-minded Indians are uncomfortable with the BJP and hence default to the Congress, despite all its shortcomings.
Then, there are the regional parties – the Samajwadi party, the BSP, the DMK, TMC, AIADMK, and the like. Given these dynamics, as of now, there are three options at the center – a Congress-led government, a BJP-led government, or a third-front government where sizeable regional parties come together to form a government. As Advani pointed out in his recent blog post, the third option is the least stable of the lot. What he didn’t mention, though, is that since the 80s, every one of these options has been tried multiple times with differing degrees of failure. The country, meanwhile, has seen the emergence and growth of regional parties, while national parties have been on a steady decline. There are many states today where neither the Congress nor the BJP have a significant presence. If this trend continues, running a coalition government at the center will soon be virtually impossible.
The big question before the country today is how long we should continue to live with various permutations of these three options. Don’t we deserve something better? Isn’t it time we gave something new a chance?
Given the current dismal state of affairs and a confluence of other developments, things bode well for a new party to emerge. Thanks to the anti-corruption movement, corruption today serves as a valuable unifier that cuts across all conventional boundaries such as caste, religion, language etc. It is a binding factor of the kind that the country has not seen since the days of the Emergency.
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