Exploring alliances

Parties begin to prepare for post-poll bargaining

There are some predictable things in general election season in India. One of those is that, towards the end of polling, parties challenging the incumbent begin to prepare the ground for possible alliances once the results are announced. So it has been, at least, since the Congress' dominance was firmly ended in the early 1990s. In the ongoing general elections, the conventional wisdom so far has been that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would be so close to a majority by itself that such manoeuvring would perhaps be unnecessary. But that narrative seems to have changed somewhat. The BJP is still confident of forming the next government, but it seems the party does not want to take chances and is, therefore, reaching out even to its former alliance partners.

The BJP's Narendra Modi had launched a series of startlingly focused attacks on various regional parties that had been members of the NDA in its last stint in power, causing them to fire back with even greater vehemence. But things seem to have changed slightly, as the party appears to have realised the need to secure the support of as many regional parties as possible. Over the weekend, both Mr Modi and BJP President Rajnath Singh suggested that a return to the NDA would count as a homecoming for these former allies. Mr Modi has also recalibrated "victory" for himself and the BJP, as a defeat for the "mother-son Congress government", resurrecting the old idea of the NDA as an attractor for regional parties that saw the Congress as their primary enemy. He answered some of the biggest demands of these parties by specifying that "special financial packages" for states like Odisha or West Bengal might be arranged.

But Mr Modi and his party are not the only ones playing this game; the positioning is coming from other parties as well. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has been instrumental in the creation of many national alliances since 1989, revealed that it expected the Congress to play a role in creating a "secular formation" in order to keep Mr Modi out of 7, Race Course Road after the results. The situation specifically being referenced was the one in 1996, when the Congress supported a Third Front alternative - which included some ministers from the Communist Party of India - from outside, rather than the 2004 situation, in which the Communist parties, at a historic high in the Lok Sabha, provided the crucial support to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. This statement came from party leader Prakash Karat, long criticised for being less of a coalition man than his predecessor Harkishan Singh Surjeet. Still, it remains doubtful if the Left will even get enough seats to play a major role in coalition building this time around.

These attempts may still come to nothing. The various regional parties seem to have been turned off by Mr Modi's personalised attacks on them - the Trinamool Congress, in particular, had the harshest of words for Mr Modi last week. And the Left's attempts may come to nothing if Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi has his way; he said on Saturday that the Congress was interested only in getting the numbers for itself and wouldn't support anyone else. But it is clear that, at any rate, the mechanics and arithmetic of coalition politics are once again reasserting themselves.