Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
With the general election due in another two months war rooms of both the National Democratic Alliance and the United Progressive Alliance have reenergized their quest for potentially game-changing alliances, the first led by the BJP and its Prime Ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi the other by the Congress party and its never-say-die young leader, Rahul Gandhi.
Against the over 20 allies with which the BJP led the NDA in 1999, in the upcoming elections it will have to make do with just half a dozen allies including the Shiv Sena, Akali Dal, Telugu Desam, MDMK and one of two possible Haryana parties, the Janahit Party or the Lok Dal of the Chautalas .
The beleaguered Congress is pulling out all stops in Bihar trying to forge a front with the Rashtriya Janata Dal of Laloo Prasad, just out-of-jail following the misery of a prison term in the ‘chara gotala’ case, and Ram Vilas Paswan’s LPJ; in Tamilnadu it has not given up on Karunanidhi and his DMK and Vijaykanth’s MDMK; and it has tried to save at least half of its seats in Andhra by opting for Telengana in the company of YRS, believing that to be a better option; in Maharashtra despite conflicting signals from Sharad Pawar’s NCP, it will go together with the party, indeed having worked out a seat-sharing deal; and in Jharkhand it has the JMM and in Kerala its UDF partners.
The party is known to be working hard to ink a pact with Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party to get at least a toehold in Uttar Pradesh which sends the largest contingent of MPs to Lok Sabha and where the party has a nominal presence in the Lok Sabha.
Making or breaking alliances continues to be trying your hand at the art of the possible. That’s what getting your alliances right is all about.
Those on Narendra Modi’s “woo-list” included the Trinamool Congress, Asom Gana Parishad, Biju Janata Dal, AIADMK of J. Jayalalitha, and Jharkhand Vikas Morcha Prajatantrik including the hope of getting Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena on board. The Thackeray one, though, can be taken as a non-starter because the BJP has an ongoing alliance with the Shiv Sena, now led by Balasaheb’ son Udhav Thackheray.
Last week itself the BJP mascot’s failure to bring these parties together became clear when the AIADMK, the four Leftist parties including the CPM, BJD, AGP, JVMP along with the Janata Dal (U) formed an alliance, a Third Front they called it and it would fight the Lok Sabha election jointly. The Front on the face of it may look impressive enough but with the exception of Jayalalitha’s AIADMK, the rest are limited even in their respective States, without complementing each others votes. The Marxists, for their part, are a poor shadow of their earlier self, Mamta Banerjee having taken the micky out of them in West Bengal. They, though, continue to be a force in Kerala.
The coming together of these parties as the Third Front has obviously created one more headache for both the UPA and the NDA.
Then there is the spoiler Arvind Kejriwal, flush with his success in the Delhi Assembly elections, poised to cast his net in the State; his Aam Admi Party could indeed make a dent in what many have seen as a BJP surge in urban centers. The JDU’s Sharad Yadav however believes that their Third Front will provide a more dependable option to the BJP and Congress-led alliances. Some in the JDU believe that the regional parties in the Third Front may form government in one or the other their State with outside support from the Congress. Others who treat the Third Front as a pre-poll parking lot could go either with the Congress or the BJP post-polls.
What no BJP leader will admit in public is that the emergence of the third alternative has also promoted many conflicting interests within the saffron camp to make their own post-poll calculations. For Modi’s ambition to play out the saffron party must cross its own best performance record of 182 seats to at least 200 for it to be able to form the government with the help of its allies. Should the BJP’s tally go below 170 the lack of pre-poll allies would open up the possibility of a more acceptable (to allies) BJP leader emerging as the Prime Ministerial candidate. Narendra Modi cannot be unaware of this possible scenario.
L.K. Advani’s message earlier this week that he is not retiring from politics and would indeed contest for the Lok Sabha must have rung alarms bells in the Modi camp for Advani does have more acceptability among other parties than any other BJP leader. His being there could help forge alliances.
When the Atal Bihari Vajpayee led ruling NDA suffered a defeat in the 2004 ‘India Shinning’ general election campaign it took a while for the party leadership to put in perspective the reasons for the Congress upsetting their calculations. Their eventual conclusion was that the NDA didn’t lose because of a governance deficit but because it fell short on the alliance front; it lost to a Congress that had cobbled together a larger and superior coalition of parties to form the United Progressive Alliance. Yet as the BJP has unleashed a much tom-tommed Modi campaign in the hope of creating a national saffron wave, a section of the leadership has realized that the Modi factor may make alliances less of an imperative.
The flip side- and there is abundant evidence available – of course is Modi’s limited ability to attract allies which in the first place gives the NDA few choices but to prop him up as their trump card.
That a more realistic section of UPA’s supporters believes that their government has failed to deliver on governance, made worse by a gloomy economy and political instability in the country, offers by far the most telling evidence of the BJPs prospects of striking gold this time over. “You don’t need further confirmation of the fact that the UPA and its policies, not to mention corruption and high inflation, have made for a disastrous outcome a clear possibility. How else do you explain the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh virtually staying indoors during the ongoing campaign? Even Congress President Sonia Gandhi has been making only selective appearances at mass rallies. And, yet, as an important Congress spokesmen (TV) Randip Singh Surjewala puts it “politics is an expression of possibilities and those possibilities change with the passage of time.” Let’s wait and see; the odds seem to be heavily loaded against his party.
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