Federal Front

Dipankar Bose
Social media is picking up with Indian politicians and many are now opting for Fecebook or Twitter to post comments, express reactions.
Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is a relative new entrant in this club, but has rapidly caught up.
On June 10, a post in her Facebook account said: “Time has come for all regional parties to come together and form a Federal Front in the coming Lok Sabha election. I appeal to all non-Congress, non-BJP regional parties to launch a united fight to free the country from misrule and anti-people decisions, and work together to build a better and brighter India. Let us stand together. Let us talk together. Let us decide a plan of action for the next Lok Sabha election.”
Federal fronts are nothing new in the country. Fronts have come in many avatars since 1977, when the Janata Party Government came to power after the 1975-77 State of Emergency, with Morarji Desai as the Prime Minister. Desai was forced to resign and his successor Chaudhary Charan Singh also failed to sustain a Parliamentary majority.
Experiments didn’t stop here with forming non- Congress alliances. The National Front government-led by V P Singh and steered by N T Rama Rao in 1989-1990 and closely followed by Chandrasekhar as the eighth Prime Minister to lead a rainbow alliance on November 10, 1990 only to resign on March 6, 1991, were the next two formations.
The other avatars were in between 1996 and 1998, when H D Devegowda and I K Gujral subsequently headed the United Front government at the Centre.
Subsequently, all regional parties either grouped under the umbrella of the BJP-led NDA alliance or the Congress-led UPA alliance.
The last line of Mamata’s Facebook post calls for a plan of action for the next general elections, but can she romp in the numbers?
So far, Mamata has claimed that three persons have responded to her call – Chief Minsters Nitish Kumar from Bihar and Naveen Patnaik from Odisha and former Jharkhand Chief Minster Babulal Marandi.
The grapevine is TDP leader N Chandrababu Naidu has shown some interest in Banerjee’s idea. Back channel talks have also taken place with rebel Congress.
Nitish has already taken a calculated risk of severing his seventeen year alliance with BJP. He hopes to repeat what his predecessor Lalu Yadav did in Bihar in 1990.
The arrest of L K Advani by Lalu had catapulted him in Bihar’s politics as the only leader, capable of securing Muslim minority interests, creating a new Muslim-Yadav (M-Y) equation in the state.
Around two decades later Nitish is trying the same arithmetic in Bihar. Walking out of the NDA and alienating himself from Narendra Modi, he hopes to secure the Kurmi-Kairi and Extremely Backward Class vote bank in his favour (which is around 30 per cent in Bihar), risking the loss of Thakur, Bhumihar and upper-class Brahmin votes.
But, in Bihar, BJP will also be backing its campaign in favour of Modi, who has an OBC background. In a three cornered contest, which is now inevitable in the state, between BJP, JD(U) and Lalu Prasad’s RJD-Congress alliance, how much can Nitish increase his tally of 20 seats he won in the 2009 polls, will be a big question. Moreover, Nitish will always keep in mind the JD(U)’s recent defeat in the Maharajganj bye-election.
Congress has literally taken a backseat in the politics of Odisha and Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) seems to be the only alternative in the Maoist-violence ridden state. Patnaik can hope to retain his tally of 14 seats in the next general elections.
Trinamool is back to the drawing board of pre- 2009, before it forged an alliance with Congress. In the last Lok Sabha polls, the combined anti-Left votes saw the alliance home with 25 seats (19-Trinamool and 6-Congress).
In the 2011 Assembly polls, the alliance successfully routed the Left Front from West Bengal for the first time in 34 years. But, much water went down the Hooghly and Mamata Banerjee has pulled out of the Congress-led UPA at the Centre.
So, very much like Bihar, the propagator of Federal Front will have to face the general elections in a triangular contest between the Congress, the Left Front and themselves (Trinamool Congress).
In two years since Banerjee’s government has come to power, the eastern state has recorded maximum number of crimes against women among all states, according to statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau on June 14.
The pre-2009 situation was never comfortable for Trinamool, which till then had only one member in the Lok Sabha. A litmus test for the party in the recently concluded Howrah bypoll has also not presented it with any remarkable figures.
Trinamool candidate Prasun Banerjee, a former footballer, defeated his nearest rival, Sridip Bhattacharjee of the CPI(M) by 26,965 votes. An interesting anecdote – BJP withdrew its candidate at the final moment, which has about 50,000 votes in the constituency.
In fact, in the 2009 Lok Sabha election BJP got 37,703 votes, in an atmosphere charged in favour of the TMC. The united kitty of Trinamool Congress and Congress from the constituency posed a 37,655 vote victory margin against the CPI(M) that time. The bypoll results now show that if BJP was in the fray, the Trinamool would have been in big trouble.
A triangular contest in Bengal in the general elections has the potential to considerably dampen the spirits of Mamata Banerjee and along with that, her idea of a non-Congress, non-BJP Federal Front.
Between the three, the TMC, JD (U) and BJD now hold 53 Lok Sabha seats out of the total 103 across the three states of Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha. Even if Naveen Patnaik keeps his tally of 14 seats secured in the general elections, a combined kitty of around 50 seats can never be anywhere close to the 272 majority mark required to form a government at the Centre.
Some more allies might be lured into this front proposed by Banerjee, but again who will be the unanimously accepted face of the front?
Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Naveen Patnaik, Chandrababu Naidu, Jayalalithaa (or for that reason M Karunanidhi) – the names just keep cropping up with no real front runner amid the monumental egos possessed by the leaders.
And the Left is also propagating a secular democratic alternative (albeit post-poll). The CPI(M) has already upped its ante against bêtenoire Mamata Banerjee criticising her for trying to float this Federal Front without any concrete minimum governance proposal or national policy.

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