Idealists, never content with a good idea, insist on distillation
towards purer variations. One would have thought that Churchill ended
the debate about democracy with his pithy reminder that while it could
be awful, everything else was worse. But ever since the savage became
noble enough to share power on some basis other than physical strength
or economic stranglehold, the search for "total democracy" has been as
relentless as it is illusory. Purity is the privilege of heaven; earth,
alas, is all about varieties of putrefaction.

Indian variety can get odorous. An election begins with arbitrary
selection. Candidates are named by a leader. The voter merely chooses
from among the chosen. Merit is rarely the primary qualification;
loyalty is, followed by the compulsions of demographics. As the stakes
rise, and we move into the rarified regions of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the
complexities multiply if the environment is unsettled. The only
satisfying by-product is that the process becomes as compelling a story
as the election itself.

An
election can be only as clear or confused as the state of the
electorate. If the people of India were choosing the next President,
there would be enviable clarity. The establishment candidate would lose.
But votes will be cast by MPs and MLAs; roughly, the polity. Since the
political class is in disarray, the Presidential poll cannot be in
array. No one is in command of numbers. The Congress, for reasons best
known to itself, assumed that it could live above the reach of growing
public anger and still control events by a wave of Mrs Sonia Gandhi's
magic wand. Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee have drained the
magic out of this wand by telling Congress that omnipotence may work
with gods, but is not sustainable in human affairs.

Nothing is an accident in politics. President Abdul Kalam's name did
not emerge from a conjurer's hat. The leaders of the coup that stunned
Congress and maimed UPA knew that NDA wanted to re-elect Kalam but did
not have the ability which is why it used silence as strategy. They have
placed dynamite under UPA, since Kalam is the one person Congress
cannot accept except under huge duress. The fuse is with Mulayam and the
matchbox with Mamata.

They also have a pretty decent argument. Kalam brings both consensus
and stature to the table. Another significant UPA partner, DMK, cannot
ignore the fact that he is Tamil, just as five years ago Shiv Sena could
not ignore the fact that Mrs Pratibha Patil was Marathi. Sharad Pawar
has been insisting on consensus for weeks. Consensus, it should be
noted, is not the same thing as unanimity.

The Congress refused to see the obvious because complacence is a
blindfold and eight years is a long time in power. It even took a while
to understand why Dr Manmohan Singh was on the Mulayam-Mamata list. The
hope that this might give Sonia Gandhi a bit of wriggle room evaporated
when, within hours, the Prime Minister firmly rejected the option. This
was his own decision. By then Mulayam's spokesmen had told the country
on television that their real purpose was to push the PM upstairs so
that someone more competent could take his place. They quoted the
eminent industrialist Azim Premji, who dismissed UPA as a leaderless
government. The implications are uncomplicated. SP and TMC MPs can no
longer support a Manmohan Government in Parliament-if there is a next
session of this Parliament.

The Congress could not even see what was widely discussed along the
political grapevine. We are witnessing the play for not just one
election, but for two. The strategies move on parallel lines, before
they intersect. The second is the more important battle ahead: The next
General Election. Mulayam has been totally transparent. He held a
parliamentary party meeting to choose his candidates for a Lok Sabha
campaign. He wants them early. He knows that time can only diminish his
prospects. If UPA cannot get its candidate as President, the Government
cannot survive.

This is only the first, if dramatic, bit of evidence of the impact
that a Mulayam-Mamata partnership can have on Indian politics. Their
first objective is to make Congress yesterday's story. Their second is
to win between 60 and 70 seats in a 2013 poll, and, with help from
smaller parties, form a bloc of 100 or more MPs. This will give them
decisive bargaining power in the next alliance.

Mulayam left Lucknow to son Akhilesh not because of age, but because he has Delhi in his sights.

UPA can pretend that this is business as usual, and the PM blithely
continue on his 10-day tour to the more exotic parts of the world, but
his Government has become about as fragile as that of Deve Gowda or
Inder Gujral after Congress withdrew its support. When democracy slides
off into confusion, there is only one solution: more democracy. Time for
fresh elections.