It is a question of what is worse, not what is good.

With seats in the present Lok Sabha divided among 36 parties, S Chakrabarti has calculated that, "A terrifying prospect awaits India if general election results go a certain way." To have a stable government, the BJP, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party, and the Congress together must get over 300 seats. This is what happened in 1991, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014. In each case one of the two main parties had the largest number of seats in the Lok Sabha and was able to form a stable coalition with the support of regional parties. However, when the BJP or the Congress did not have enough seats, one of them gave outside support to a motley collection of smaller parties. Why is it terrifying? Because, "A government such as this will be inherently unstable, permanently squabbling, it will be comprised mostly of parties that can be brutally transactional, every constituent party will try to push its regional, caste/voter base special interests, .... since parties in power will know their government may not last five years, they will have major incentives for, shall we say, using the system to enhance their capital base." In short, a completely unstable corrupt government. Leaders of opposition parties are gathering in Kolkata to support Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's rally against the BJP. Old enemies, Akhilesh Yadav of SP and Mayawati of BSP have formed an alliance to jointly fight the BJP in UP, which has the largest number of seats in the Lok Sabha. In 2014, the SP and BSP got a total of 42.1% of votes in UP (SP 22.3% and BSP 19.8%) but because each of them "went it alone SP got 5 seats, BSP and RLD drew a blank, and BJP managed to score a whopping 71," wrote N Chowdhury. They refused to include the Congress in the alliance because Mayawati was afraid of losing Dalit votes, while disillusioned upper castes could switch to the Congress from the BJP. "Mayawati is famous for her political treachery and all this is done with a design to strengthen the party," wrote B Banerjee. The BJP depends on the personal popularity of Modi and has a formidable organisation in rural areas. The BJP is driven by its ideology but people will be voting on whether they are better off than 5 years ago. Unfortunately, politicians are motivated by self interest which means that they align their party along castes or linguistic lines and are less interested in reforms, wrote Prof S Rajagopalan. If disillusioned voters do not give the BJP/Congress combined more than 300 seats a third front could grab power, in which case "Markets will likely tank, India as a foreign investment destination will lose much of its lustre ... and, of course, it will be the middle and low income Indians who will bear the brunt". They are the people who vote these politicians to power. Everyone suffers.