A Government Like Any Other?

During their fi rst two years in power between 1983 and 1985, the Janata Party’s minority government and its Chief Minister had constantly faced the possibility of sudden political extinction. The election victory of 1985 eased this pressure and caused Hegde to relax somewhat. It also made him a potential national leader. This was a potent distraction from the management of state-level affairs and, together with his more relaxed approach as the head of a now secure majority in the state legislature, it made him prone to lapses of judgement, leading his government into avoidable embarrassments. It had suffered them earlier too. The bungled attempt to engineer the defection of a Congress legislator with an offer of a cabinet post, noted in Chapter 7, had been an egregious example. But as missteps and troubles now mounted, people increasingly came to see this supposedly ‘values-based government’ as something altogether more ordinary and less inspiring than what they had earlier thought it to be — a government like any other.