NEW DELHI, Mar 9: "We have managed to get it in one frame," television anchor Prannoy Roy told the country's prime time audience last week."I hope you can read it."Rows and rows of abbreviations filled the screen, listing the number of seats picked up by various parties in the Lok Sabha polls.
After a mid-term election which nobody wanted, the country is struggling with the prospect of a government which will have to stomach an alphabet soup of untested allies and opponents.
Small parties and sundry independents hold the key to a majority in the fragmented Lok Sabha, which has 545 members.
The three leading groups -- led by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress Party and the existing United Front coalition -- between them account for around 30 parties. Each needs more allies to form a clear majority.
"Any small group can hold an 18-party coalition to ransom," political columnist Inder Malhotra told Reuters on Monday. "Any group which wants to cross over can change the whole picture.
"Inall honesty, to be able to forecast what will happen in the next 100 days is not easy."
BJP, tipped to form the government, has the support of 253 lawmakers from the 536 seats for which results have been declared. But it has only 178 seats of its own. Eleven parties account for the rest.
The BJP needs 20 more seats to hit the magic majority number of 272. It is struggling to evolve a common agenda with allies which include firebrand socialists and demanding regional rebels fired by ambition.
Newspapers have begun speculating on a tug-of-war between allies over cabinet posts and other goodies of political power.
The 15-party United Front, a disparate coalition that ruled for 18 months until its collapse last November, was a comparatively more cohesive group.It stuck together on economic reform and cemented the coalition with a common desire to keep the BJP out of power.
The United Front, which bands regional parties, free-marketeers, communists, Fabian socialists and low-caste radicals, is dividedover whether to edge closer to the Congress which caused it to topple by withdrawing its lifeblood support.
Congress has 140 seats of its own, and 26 more from allies. To stop the BJP from ruling, it needs to woo the United Front, whose members have won 96.Even if the Front provides backing, the Congress would still need 10 more seats from sundry parties and deputies.
As many as 130 seats in the 12th Parliament are occupied by ten parties which have won between one and 12 seats each.
With names as obscure as their agendas, small parties like the Autonomous State Demands Committee, All India Rashtriya Janata Party (National People's Party) and Pattali Makkal Katchi (Toiling People's Party) would traditionally have had nothing more than backbenchers making the occasional speech.
But in this badly fractured Parliament each one is crucial for governance and a majority in a vote of confidence -- and each is capable of demanding its pound of flesh.
Malhotra said the coming of one group into an alliancecould provoke another to exit, adding to the ferment.
Television crews last week were looking for two members of Arunachal Congress, to see who they would support. Ordinarily, regional deputies from the distant state of Arunachal Pradesh near the Chinese border would not matter in federal politics.
Television satirist Jaspal Bhatti, founder of an imaginary Nonsense Party, said last week that each party must be allowed to rule in proporton to the number of the seats it won.
He hoped his own party would get to rule for two minutes.
