• Larger parties lure small regional party into a pre-poll alliance to ensure consolidation of votes, even though there is no guarantee that every voter will automatically transfer their vote to the bigger party.
• This process undermines the diversity of the country and the right of regional parties to gain power in case they represent true choice of the voters.
• Voters while voting for a party also votes for their ideology which gets subsumed or merged or replaced by new ideology when ‘unnatural allies’ are formed, such new ideologies may often  not be in consonance with the choice of voters.
• When parties contest with ‘unnatural allies’, they do not abandon their ideological stances in case of conflict, but instead, they pivot to an alternative, coherent, ideological stance.
• The ‘unnatural allies’ amongst the parties are the reason of many political instabilities of the nation, some of them has also led to economic crises in the country as in case of early 1990s.

Factors of unnatural alliances:

• Vote Bank: The aim is to ensure that votes of one formation do not get divided and to minimize splitting of votes on each side.
• Electoral system: it is a political response to the arithmetic of the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system in India’s extremely diverse political landscape.
• First-past-the-post voting (FPTP) is an electoral system wherein voters cast a vote for a single candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election.
• The FPTP method is not completely suitable with India’s unique political variability.
• Politics of statism: It is the doctrine that political authority of the state is legitimate to some extent.
• This may include economic and social policy, especially in terms of taxation and means of production.
• Unique diversity of India: there is proliferation of many political parties in order to gain representation.
• Parties exert various methods to get into power and influence the public by unusual strategies and groupings.
• Inherent ideologies of parties:
• Indian politics cannot be force-fitted into a two-party system like other democracies and so such alliance is not stable.
• When parties contest with unnatural allies, they do not abandon deep rooted ideologies.

Ways for prevention:

Alternative voting method:

• Approval voting is more aligned to prevent the splitting of votes among parties.
• It can potentially obviate the need for elaborate and complex alliance and unity-building initiatives.
• Approval voting is a well-researched methodology used in elections with multiple credible choices, such as in the United Nations or election of the Pope.
• The winner is determined by the candidate with the greatest number of approvals or tick marks.

Benefits of Approval voting for India:

• In the Indian context, approval voting such as MOTA (Many Of the Above) can be a way forward, though its mirror image NOTA are present on every ballot.
• Under MOTA, voters do not have to rank their preference of candidates but instead can choose any number of appropriate candidates.
• It is simple and easy for the average Indian voter to just tick all chosen parties.
• MOTA is not preferred for a two-party democracy but for India, MOTA is a more elegant way to reduce voter fragmentation rather than complex and unstable electoral alliances.
• MOTA can produce more acceptable outcomes in a multi-party democracy.
• It legitimizes agnosticism without the need for a formal alliance and the risk of keeping that alliance post-election.
• There is an opportunity to change the dynamics of complicated political alliances, seat sharing, and institutionalization of the politics of money and fear.
• MOTA can be a solution to end aaya Ram gaya Ram woes in Indian politics.
• The phrase “aaya Ram gaya Ram” is an expression of Indian politics leading to frequent floor-crossing, switching parties and political horse trading in the legislature by the elected politicians and political parties.
• Politics of recognition: The identity of individual is formed through a process of mutual recognition between different people.
• It would reduce opportunistic political alliances in favour of ideological politics.

Unity talks among political parties for an election are a manifestation of India’s political diversity and its FPTP voting method. Many times, regional parties are true representative of the choice of the people which are undermined due to formation of alliance with a bigger dominant party. India’s political diversity is both a necessity and an inevitability, which gets subsumed under such unnatural alliances. The replacement of FPTP method with MOTA can fundamentally alter Indian politics and society towards inclusive democracy and representative democracy.