India's latest political crisis has underlined the instability of the hung parliament elected at the country's last polls just over a year ago.

In fact, India has not had a majority government since the elections of 1989 reduced the Congress party from a long dominant position in parliament to a minority.

Only one government since then, a Congress minority government led by P V Narasimha Rao, survived its full term between 1991 and 96.

Every other non-Congress government - all six of them - has not.

The collapse of Congress

Several factors have made Indian politics into the faction-ridden, splintered mess of today. One is the collapse of the once totally dominant Congress.

Congress spearheaded India's independence struggle and governed the country almost uninterrupted for most of its first 40 years of existence as a sovereign state.

Before independence in 1947, Congress worked hard to weld together as a broad a support base as possible in India's disparate society. It became known as the party of the underprivileged, thanks to the work of Mahatma Gandhi, but it was funded by India's top capitalists.

Muslims and upper caste Hindus alike supported it, urban and rural voters generally backed Congress.

But over the years that support began to wear away, in part because the party was not perceived to be doing enough to help a particular group.

Caste politics

At the same time, especially in the past 20 years, there appeared smaller regional parties or those grouped around a specific social agenda, representing a particular Hindu caste.

These picked up support from deserting Congress voters, but they really caught on in the late 1980s when affirmative action for low and so-called backward caste Hindus was broadened by the minority government lead by Prime Minister V P Singh.

India's two most caste-ridden states, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, saw an explosion of caste politics with the large Yadav community eventually dominant.

Parties representing the so-called dalit or untouchable caste spread outward from Bombay, where they had a long tradition of activism.

Muslim supporters deserted the Congress in droves in 1992 and 93 after the destruction of the Babri mosque in the northern town of Ayodyha.

The party, and its Prime Minister, P V Narasimha Rao, was perceived to have been at least passively complicit in the act of destruction by supporters of the Hindu nationalist BJP and more extreme groups.

BJP support also surged at that time as the party actively courted high caste Hindus and the urban middle classes.

Regionalism rules

Meanwhile in south India, the traditional politics of Congress was slowly being supplanted by parties with a strictly regional agenda. This process had been under way since the 1960s in Tamil Nadu.

In the nineties, these parties turned their attention to national affairs, largely to push a local agenda but they became an unavoidable fact of coalition building in Delhi.

A number of other Indian states have spawned such parties although they are not as successful as in the south.

Finally, the left wing of Indian politics remains relatively strong, if somewhat cluttered and factionalised.

The two main Communist parties, with bases in at least two states and powerful support from trade unions, are now full-fledged players in coalition politics.

Even the larger of the two, the CPI Marxist, has abandoned its old principles of not joining any government that it does not lead.

The 18-month United Front government had cabinet ministers from the other communist party, and any future coalition in India of non-Congress, non-BJP parties will have to include communists.

It all adds up to a confusing array of choices for the voter; some ballot papers have 200 names on them.

The parliament has more than 40 parties with 15 the minimum number of participants for a successful coalition.