Professor Bidyut Chakrabarty provides a brief survey of the tangled coalition politics in the general election now underway in India:
The results of the last two consecutive Lok Sabha polls confirmed the decline of pan-Indian parties and their inability to form governments at the Centre without support from regional and state-based parties. Both the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and United Progressive Alliance (UPA) are illustrative of coalitions that are not ideology-inspired, but formed by parties clustered around two major parties, the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for specific political gains with regard to the constituencies they represent. By forming alliances with well-entrenched regional parties, both these national parties are guided by calculations of electoral victory. The smaller regional parties form alliances with leading national parties for a federal presence while the former agree to join hands with the latter to capture office.
More here.
And below a few election season cartoons from the English-language media:
