The beginning of June in India saw the beginning of a unique experiment: for the first time in its history, a broad-based 13-party coalition of disparate elements took over the reigns of power. A very prominent group in this comprised the ´Federal Front´, a conglomeration of regional parties that between themselves had garnered a substantial chunk of votes in the April-May general elections. Faced with a choice at the national level between the Congress Party, now widely perceived as moribund and corrupt, and a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that seeks to impose a monocultural identity on the country, the voters had chosen instead to allow regional issues and alternatives to come to the fore.
Mercifully, there was no assassination to render the polls an emotional exercise, as in 1984 and 1991 when Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were violently removed from the scene. Despite the trouble in Kashmir, "unity and stability" did not develop as issues in this election as had happened in the previous ones. Ironically, it was P.V. Narasimha Rao´s stable government of the last five years which made that electoral plank obsolete. With nearly half a century of freedom and democratic rule under its belt, the public was confident enough to ignore exhortations on the need for a strong centre. This was an election which focused on local issues of immediate concern.
Former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar believes that this development does not bode well for the Indian Union. He and others like him believe that things will begin to fall apart and the centre will not hold. On the other hand, another former Prime Minister, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, believes that this is an opportunity for India to establish a truly federal polity. The relationship between New Delhi and the states has always been an uneasy one, and this has been specially true in states ruled by a party other than the one in power at the Centre. Even when chief ministers were of the same party as the Prime Minister, their wings were clipped the moment they were seen as developing into rival power centres. If it was not Article 356 of the Constitution that was arbitrarily used to dismiss unfriendly state governments, then New Delhi often succeeded in ruffling feathers by drawing the purse strings too tight.
Existing constitutional provisions concentrate fiscal powers in the Central Government, with New Delhi holding the right to disburse national wealth among the states. The report of the Sarkaria Commission, instituted to look into centre-state relations, had recommended that the states be given a bigger share in fiscal powers. Both the BJP and the United Front have made promises to implement the recommendations of the Sarkaria Commission and amend Article 356 to prevent its abuse.