THE second-biggest party in India’s ruling coalition announced on Tuesday (March 19) it was withdrawing from the government, heightening the risk of early elections before their scheduled date next year.
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a regional party from Tamil Nadu, had been pressuring the government to condemn Sri Lanka for alleged war crimes against ethnic minority Tamils during the island’s civil war.
Party leader Muthuvel Karunanidhi told a press conference in Chennai that his party would pull out of the left-leaning United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition which has been in power since 2009.
“We can’t accept the stand of the centre,” said Karunanidhi.
Unless a solution is found – the DMK has threatened in the past to withdraw without following through – the government would be more vulnerable to falling before the scheduled date for elections in the first half of 2014.
The UPA is dominated by the Congress party run by the Gandhi political dynasty and has technically been a minority in parliament since September when another regional party withdrew.
It has so far marshalled support from outside allies to pass legislation, and analysts said the DMK’s loss would be unlikely to trigger polls in the short term.
“No one expects the government to fall, but the drop in numbers will affect its stability,” Parsa Venkateshwar Rao, a political columnist for the DNA daily newspaper, told reporters.
“The picture is that this government is in disarray, facing crisis after crisis.”
The DMK, which depends on Tamil voters who have close ties to their counterparts in Sri Lanka, is the second-biggest coalition member with 18 members of parliament and has five mostly junior positions in cabinet.
Finance Minister P Chidambaram told reporters on Tuesday the government remained “stable” and Karunanidhi might be persuaded to stay if parliament passed a resolution condemning Sri Lanka.
“He will review his decision if that resolution is brought before cabinet,” he told reporters.
The instability comes amid a sharp slowdown in economic growth, which has slipped to decade lows, and could affect the government’s declared intention to introduce more pro-market reforms.
Shares on the Bombay Stock Exchange fell 1.32 per cent to 19,038.98 points in early afternoon, despite a cut in interest rates announced by the central bank.
The power of regional parties has risen steadily in India politics over the last decades, with often unwieldy coalitions a feature of power since Congress lost its outright majority in parliament in 1989.
The Trinamool party in West Bengal state withdrew from the coalition last September after objecting to new policies that opened up the retail sector to foreign supermarkets.
Chidambaram was among three senior ministers who rushed to Chennai at the weekend to seek a solution with the DMK, with the government trying to balance domestic political needs against a desire not to antagonise a neighbour.
Karunanidhi had warned that the DMK would withdraw unless the government supported a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva that condemned “genocide and war crimes” in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lankan forces ended a decades-long civil war with a 2009 onslaught against Tamil Tiger separatists which has since been dogged by war crime allegations.
The UN estimated that some 40,000 people were killed in the final months of the war, while rights groups put the death toll even higher. Sri Lanka denies that its forces killed civilians.
The UPA coalition would control 230 seats in the lower house of parliament if the DMK withdrew, far short of a majority of 272.
But the support of outside allies the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party, which mostly vote in favour of the UPA, would give it 273 seats.
Political columnist BG Verghese said the move was typical political brinkmanship.
“I see the pullout as a lot of bluff and blackmail by the DMK,” he told reporters.
“I don’t see any threat to the Congress government. Minority governments have functioned in the past and done very well.”
