Two explanations are possible for what has been going on. One is that the price for supporting the government (or not supporting it, as the case may be) is plain cash, or a ministership, or a combination of the two. The other is that parties are looking beyond the trust vote, at the next Lok Sabha elections — which are no further than nine or 10 months away — and making their choices on the basis of assessments of which alliance will work to their advantage at the hustings. In other words, what is involved is not unprincipled commerce but hard calculations about political self-interest.

The curious aspect of the scene is that most of the action centres on the small, fringe parties, which are free to switch sides at will. This should prompt a re-look at the anti-defection law of 1985, which was designed to prevent floor-crossing by individual legislators, but did not address the issue of parties doing the same thing. As a consequence, a three-member ginger group in a large party has no freedom of manoeuvre because of the anti-defection law, but a three-member party is completely free to do what it wants. In other words, the law has the perverse effect of encouraging the mushrooming of fringe parties, many of which have cropped up since 1985. If left uncorrected, this could result in the large parties losing even more of their stalwarts with a sectional following in some corner of the country, who decide to strike out on their own. What this will result in is more and more unstable coalitions where the "anchor party" is at the mercy of the fringe parties.

This can and should be corrected, by extending the remit of the anti-defection law to cover parties that are part of a coalition arrangement when a government is formed. If any party or parties then want to leave the coalition, at least a third of the members of the coalition must act in concert so that disqualification does not follow. If this is considered too stifling for independent parties, who might feel that this places them at the mercy of the lead party in a coalition, the one-third requirement can be dropped to, say, a fourth. What matters is not the detail, but the principle of extending the anti-defection law to cover not just individuals but also parties. If this is not done, politics will become ever more unstable and even more unedifying (risking widespread cynicism about the system), and the country even more ungovernable.