Whither grand alliance?

Congress should manage regional parties better

There has been hectic activity in political circles in the past few days. First, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and party President Amit Shah, exhorted the party cadre to make one last push towards defeating the so-called Mahagathbandan or grand alliance among several Opposition parties. In fact, the PM appealed to the citizens to use the NaMo app and share with him whether a grand alliance will work in their areas. Both Mr Modi and Mr Shah also termed the tie-up between the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party as a “leaderless opportunistic alliance” which can at best provide a “majboor sarkar” (helpless government) as against a majboot sarkar (strong government), which can be provided by the BJP. 

 

The alliance between the BSP and SP is for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, and both Mayawati and Akhilesh Yadav indicated that it would continue beyond that. However, this could not be converted into the beginning of a nation-wide grand alliance, as the two regional satraps left the Congress out of the alliance. This was the second snub for the Congress, as the BSP had walked out of alliance talks with the party in the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh as well, dealing a severe blow to the efforts of the opposition to forge a united front against the BJP. Though the Congress defeated the BJP by a long margin in Chhattisgarh, the party somehow managed to hit the majority mark in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, leading many experts to argue that the victory would have been far more comfortable had the Congress been able to strike a pre-poll alliance with the BSP and SP. For that, the grand old party had to shed what Mayawati termed its “big brother” approach.

 

In Uttar Pradesh, of course, the situation is quite different with the two regional parties enjoying a much greater vote share than the Congress. In the general elections in 2014, for instance, the SP and BSP had roughly 22 and 20 per cent vote share, respectively, while the Congress barely managed to cross the 7 per cent mark. The BJP had slightly more than 42 per cent. The decision of the SP and BSP to leave the Congress aside places a big question mark on the feasibility of a grand alliance, not to mention the ability of the Congress to present itself as a viable alternative at the national level. That’s because the Congress needs to ally with several regional parties across different states in order to have enough numbers at the national level. The Congress has stated it will fight all the 80 Lok Sabha seats in UP, but the show of bravado does not impress as the party simply does not have enough cadre or support base to launch a real challenge to the BJP on its own. In UP, however, things have become tough for the BJP as well because the SP-BSP combine has enough vote share to considerably reduce the BJP’s tally in the country’s most populous state.