New Delhi: When Manmohan Singh moves the confidence motion on Monday, he will become the sixth Prime Minister since 1979 to face a trust vote in Parliament.
Of the eight trust votes in the nearly three decades since 1979, only three Prime Ministers have survived, and five others either lost the vote or had to resign before the ballot.
Thus, confidence votes have come to have a great import for coalition politics the nation has witnessed since the early 90s.
The first PM to seek a vote of confidence was Chaudhary Charan Singh in 1979 after the Congress propped him up to form a government but he opted to resign rather than face Lok Sabha with the Congress withdrawing it.
In 1990, the V P Singh government was reduced to a minority after BJP withdrew support. Congress joined hands with the BJP to ensure his government's fall in the trust vote.
In May 1996, Atal Bihari Vajpayee moved a motion of confidence, but he resigned before putting it to vote, as his government badly lacked the numbers.
In June the same year, H D Deve Gowda, as the head of the United Front government, was successful in the trust vote. But a year later, he lost, after Congress withdrew support.
In May 1997, Inder Kumar Gujral, who replaced Gowda as PM of the United Front Government, won a motion of confidence.
When Gujral's government fell in 1998 and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) emerged as the single largest group in the Lok Sabha elections that followed in 1998, Vajpayee government moved a motion of confidence and won it.
But after 13 months, AIADMK withdrew support and Vajpayee government's confidence motion in May 1999 was defeated by a single vote. Vajpayee, thus, became the only PM to have lost a confidence vote twice.
Now it is the turn of Manmohan to move a confidence motion on July 21, 2008. His fate would be known the next day, when voting takes place in Lok Sabha.
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