Those who lectured us on the beauty of the rainbow coalitions, on how governments such as Gowda's and Gujral's actually complemented India's unity in diversity, were missing the point. This once-romantic idea triggered a process of Balkanisation of the Indian political mind. In India, tragically, coalition politics now means that the idea of the nation is subordinated to the sectarian interests of the regional, or rather the sub-provincial, leader. The Akalis and Jayalalitha are not the only ones to blame. Once the leader dreamed and fought for the nation.
Today hestruggles for the mofussil.
The coalition then begins to resemble a chamber of princes without the East India Company or the Crown to keep them under check. Nehru's grand idea of unity in diversity is thereby reduced to unity by distributing the diversity among partners in power. A good example of how this reduces governance to an arrangement of mutually shared conveniences is the way this Budget has been revised, rewritten and raped after its presentation. The problem is not so much with a Balkanised polity or with regional politics. The problem is the absence of a national mindset.