2019 will either be 1996 or 2004”. To the uninitiated, this may appear gibberish. Even among those for whom it signifies a Lok Sabha election, 2019 may mean many things. It’s still a year away, but with India in a permanent state of elections (Karnataka coming soon, then Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh), the early onset of the 2019 “long season” is having a curious effect. The current Lok Sabha, utterly dysfunctional, is evidently in a mood to wind up.
Representatives of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Odisha, which go to the polls alongside the Lok Sabha, have little interest beyond securing their own political agenda. Bank scam, budget, dilution of the SC/ST Atrocities Act, Indians dying on foreign soil ... nothing matters. The state is the constituency. The regional party affiliation has subsumed the MP’s legislative role.
Among ruling BJP MPs, a suppressed anxiety is palpable: will they get a chance to recontest or not? Look at what occupies the news space. Not issues relating to the people, no policy or relief measure, but a petty slanging match between the BJP and the Congress over who used Facebook data mining firms to influence elections. Probably both did!
Next summer’s heat is already here, eight months before time, and with it the game of coalition-making. Who will be in whose camp? The go-between in the FB data mining case, the son of a prominent socialist leader, perhaps exemplifies the confusion of smaller and regional parties like the JD(U) about which side they are on!
Unlike the BJP, which has the unifying duopoly of Modi-Shah, the other side has to be an aggregate of disparate groupings. That brings us back to 1996 or 2004. Can regional parties recreate the ‘96 scenario—a United Front, with outside support of the Congress? Or can the Congress climb back up to lead a coalition, as it did in 2004? That’s the choice CPM’s Sitaram Yechury voiced.
Before the Samajwadi Party and the BSP came together to snatch Gorakhpur and Phulpur, neither possibility was seriously in the air. Those two results, along with the RJD win in Araria, Bihar, have suddenly got all satraps back in the game. Rough, back-of-the-envelope calculations show that if Akhilesh Yadav and Mayawati remain together (they could be internally and externally sabotaged), they can snatch 45-50 of Uttar Pradesh’s 80 Lok Sabha seats.
The reverse consolidations of caste seen in those voting patterns were encouraging for the Opposition. Sharad Pawar even says it would be difficult for Modi-Shah to retain NDA partners if a singular anti-BJP front comes into being. Or as Srikant Jena puts it, the SP-BSP alliance will have a pan-Indian effect, and impact voting decisions of backward and Dalit communities in Odisha, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh! Such visions could come under strain when actual seat-sharing talks happen. And where will it leave the Congress? Any vaulting ambition it has would be measured against its standing in heartland states.
Two other events brought regional parties back into focus, both had a Telugu accent, and then some more. Chandrababu Naidu’s decision to pull out of the NDA and K. Chandrashekar Rao’s helihopping to Kolkata to meet his Bengal counterpart and try cook up a non-BJP, non-Congress front. Mamata Banerjee was courteous but non-committal. She does have ambitions of evolving into a catalyst and national power centre, but is iffy about any pre-poll alliance.
Her attempt is to maximise her strike rate within her state first, pick as many of its 42 Lok Sabha seats as possible, then try impart a Bengali accent to New Delhi. An alliance with KCR suits her to some extent: she won’t have to do any seat-sharing with TRS and it enhances her bargaining power in talks for a parallel Congress-led alternative.
For KCR, a national front may help revive his ‘secular’ credentials, thus helping him counter a Congress resurgence in Telangana. Both KCR and Naidu also have an extra layer of shadow—a TMC MP close to his CM claims his ‘leader’ was not sure if the two are fronting for the BJP, to actually stop a UPA-III from emerging! The fact that a no-confidence motion could not be taken up because of the ruckus in Parliament has put doubts in the minds of prospective allies.
For Naidu, a UF-like experiment though would be a perfect solution: it may help him win a second term in the state and also call the shots in the Centre, in a way that Amaravati can be a unparalleled capital city. Of course, it depends on how Jagan Mohan Reddy fares in the game. The other regional party unlikely to do badly is the BJD. But Naveen Patnaik, like Banerjee, is unlikely to get into any pre-poll alliance. Post poll, he may remain his own man or agree to break bread in New Delhi. It depends. Just as no one knows which way Tamil Nadu will swing, whether AIADMK, DMK or a third factor will get to play kingmaker in the Centre, if at all.
Where does all this leave Rahul Gandhi and Sitaram Yechury? Rahul at least can be sure of continuing as the Congress president. His party is expected to do better in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra (the coming bypolls will show how well), Chhattisgarh, Punjab, Haryana, Kerala, Karnataka (though it’s still in a struggle to win a second Assembly term), and Telangana. But would it go beyond double digits? Poll analysts claim bullishly it could pull in anywhere between 88-120. The whole calculation rests on the assumption that the BJP will get restricted to 200. One that can unravel in the next eight to ten months.
Santwana Bhattacharya
Political Editor, The New Indian Express
Email: santwana@newindianexpress.com