Balance of power in Lok Sabha

[bengal_tiger]

Recently, I saw a news story that Jayalalitha-Ji has offered support to the UPA government in case they have to fire Mr. A. Raja and the DMK withdraws support. Naturally, I was curious to find put what the balance of power in Lok Sabha is. I came across this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lok_Sabha#Members_by_party

It seems that the UPA has 262 members in the coalition with the DMK holding 18 seats. Naturally, if they withdraw support, the UPA government will be in trouble. Note that the Lok Sabha has 543 members, so, the halfway mark is actually 272. The UPA is already short of the halfway mark by 10 seats! So, we are actually ruled by a minority government, I never hear this in the media!

Next, I wanted to find out when was the last time the government won a confidence motion. I found that happened during the left's protests against the Indo-US nuclear deal. Here is a link to the proceedings of the confidence motion:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2008/0723/p25s10-wosc.html

Apparently, the motion was passed in favour of the UPA by 275-256 votes. 275?!
But the UPA has only 262!!! Who else voted in favor? Who abstained? I tried to look this up online, but I cannot locate any voting statistics.

In a democracy, the most important thing is to find out if the party in power is legally in power. As an ordinary citizen, I was wondering if I can access these numbers easily or do I have to file an RTI application?


Added Later: OK, I did some more digging and found that I was wrong. We currently have the 15th Lok Sabha and the confidence motion on the Nuclear deal was passed in the 14th Lok Sabha.

But, I am still curious, if we actually have a minority government, where do they get the support from? Where do I get information about the last confidence motion in the Lok Sabha?

[boca]

It seems that the UPA has 262 members in the coalition with the DMK holding 18 seats. Naturally, if they withdraw support, the UPA government will be in trouble. Note that the Lok Sabha has 543 members, so, the halfway mark is actually 272. The UPA is already short of the halfway mark by 10 seats! So, we are actually ruled by a minority government, I never hear this in the media![/quote]
You just didn't read up. :) Why are you surprised now? Why not when NDA came to power with 254 seats in 1998? Or when United Front came to power with 192 (Deve Gowda - 12th PM; 1 June 1996 ? 21 April 1997) and 178 (I K Gujral - 13th PM; 21 April 1997 ? 19 March 1998)

[gwldaddu]

I think he was too young to remember such things then! :)

And is still too young to understand them now !

j/k

[bengal_tiger]

You are right about my ignorance but wrong about my age :-)

It's been a long time since I left India and PM Rajiv Gandhi's Lok Sabha is still fresh in my mind. I seemed to have missed a lot of these minority governments while I was out. That doesn't mean that I am going to stop complaining about them though, now that I am back...