Karnataka politics shows the debasement of democratic principles in India today. There are states where the party with the single largest majority is not called to form a government. There are others like Karnataka where post poll alliances cobbled up by sundry winners (Congress-JDS and others) were deprived of the chance to prove their majority. Governors have been used by ruling dispensations at the Centre to carry out their mandate to wrest power at any cost. Since 2014 May, this has happened in Manipur, Goa and Meghalaya. It’s a different matter that in all these three states the party/parties called to form the government succeeded in proving their strength on the floor of the House. This trend however, did not start with the BJP.
1n 1984, Indira Gandhi dismissed a duly elected Government of Andhra Pradesh led by NT Rama Rao whose party won 230 out of 295 seats and replaced him with her loyalist N Bhaskar Rao. In the same year the Governor dismissed the government of Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir and installed a nominee of Indira Gandhi. Between 1975-1980 Indira Gandhi dismissed nine non-Congress governments to ensure that the Congress (I) was in power in most of the states. But the Janata government was not far behind. They dismissed as many Congress governments after winning the 1977 election. PV Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister also sacked BJP governments in four states in 1992 after the Ram Mandir agitation. In fact Article 356 which allows the Centre to impose President’s Rule in case of a constitutional breakdown has been used by the ruling government of Delhi to place their own party governments in the states and to ensure that they have a majority both in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. In all cases of application of Article 356, President’s rule has been invoked against a government headed by a party which is not in power at the Centre.
The Sarkaria Commission, set up in 1983 to look into Centre-state relations pointed out that there are 13 instances from Independence till 1986, where state governments that enjoyed a majority were dismissed. The manner in which democratic principles are sought to be trampled upon from time to time just shows that no political party is interested in guarding democracy and least of all in deepening it, although after the Saturday fiasco for the BJP there were shouts of democracy being saved. Monday will reveal how democracy is yet again being put to the test.