ABSTRACT
Introduction From 1989 through 2004, while the Congress (I) party was displaced from its majority position, it remained at the ideological center of political competition in the sense that its policies balanced off against both the emphasis on Hindu nationalism, propagated by the Indian right led by the BJP, and the focus on redistribution and welfare advocated by the left and the center-left forces. Thus, one might have imagined that the Congress (I) could have entered into coalition with either one of the other two major ideological formations, or if coalitions were infeasible because of distaste for the long-ruling Congress on the part of other parties, one might have imagined that Congress, as the pivotal player, would form a minority government that would be hard to topple. In fact, the former never occurred, and the latter occurred only twice out of the five cases of minority parliaments. Moreover, the largest party was not even a member of these minority governments in two of the five cases (in 1989 and 1996).
