Six members of the erstwhile Janata Dal have last week started a move to reunite. In a much publicised meeting, former socialist comrades and current leaders from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), Janata Dal (United), Samajwadi Party (SP), Janata Dal (Secular) or JDS and Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) have decided to set aside their differences and work on a common platform to revive the “Janata Parivar” of yesteryear.
Though the avowed objective of the coming together of Bihar’s Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar, Uttar Pradesh’s Mulayam, Karnataka’s H D Deve Gowda, Haryana’s Om Prakash Chautala is to forge a united opposition to an ascendant Bharatiya Janata Party led by Narendra Modi, its immediate impact will be on the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi. The group spells more trouble for the “grand old party” which is desperately searching for an agenda to keep itself relevant in the fast changing political scenario of the country.
For an experiment that has floundered so often in the past, the proof of its viability would be in its ability to stand on its feet first. It is problematic if the reassembled family of these aging warriors of old battles can stay together on the long run.
First, Indian socialists have betrayed typical self-destructive tendencies in the past. They cannot live without each other for a long time, but they also cannot live together for too long.
Secondly, they are regrouping not on any ideological issue. The socialist ideology of yesteryears has withered away as a result of the onslaught of globalisation and liberalisation. The real challenge to these socialist mutants, who have only promoted individuals and family members in the name of social justice, is their survival. It is ironic that Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh should be chosen to orchestrate the reunification of the Janata Parivar. He was among the first to split the Janata Dal when the BJP withdrew support to the V P Singh government after Bihar chief minister Lalu Pradesh stopped L K Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra in 1990.
Never quite reconciled to V P Singh becoming prime minister, believing he had been unfairly denied the august post, Chandra Shekhar split the Janata Dal and took the outside support of Rajiv Gandhi to form the government in Delhi. Mulayam gravitated to this breakaway faction as well. In return, the Congress agreed to support the Mulayam government in Uttar Pradesh.
Quixotic critics can be excused if they describe it a case of drunks popping each other up. Each of these satraps is only interested in saving his endangered political fiefdom in the respective states and popping up their new dynasties. Even if they hang together, they will do so because hanging separately spells definite doom.
Even together, they cannot help each other in their respective political fiefdoms. The case of Deve Gowda’s JD(S) illustrates this. The party looks terribly marginalised in its home base of Karnataka. Others can gain no traction for him there and he will have to sink or swim on his own with his small Vokkaliga voter base. Similar is the case in Haryana, where a thrashed Chautala’s INLD cannot look up to others for help.
The core of the proposed alliance is thus Lalu, Mulayam and Nitish, who run relatively strong parties built on an OBC base across the two of the biggest states in the Hindi heartland—Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with 120 Lok Sabha seats between them. This is where Modi comprehensively defeated them in May 2014.
It is built on the same caste arithmetic assumption that OBCs plus Muslims will be a winning combination in the Gangetic plain. This is exactly what Modi disproved in 2014.
In UP, Modi showed that Mulayam’s Yadav-Muslim alliance can be effectively countered by a combination of upper castes, lower OBCs and a segment of Dalits. A similar lesson was administered to Nitish Kumar in Bihar. There is no doubt that the caste factor will continue to play a role in electoral politics but people are breaking out of old straitjackets, and caste calculations may not be the lone determinants of electorate behaviour in future.
The unabashed posture of Modi-baiting signifies a negativity of political thought and any alliance based on it can only work if there is strong anti-incumbency or if the alliance itself has a strong message of hope. If anything, it is Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party in UP and Nitish’s JD(U) in Bihar which face an anti-incumbency mood in their states. After five years and 10 years of rule in UP and Bihar, Modi will be better placed to counter the anti-incumbency in 2017 and 2015.
Then, there are personal factors. At 75 and 80 respectively, both Mulayam and Deve Howda are doddering. Lalu Prasad and Chautala are jail birds disqualified from contesting elections. There is no credible second generation in the outfits led by these aging veterans. That leaves only Nitish Kumar as a young knight in shining armour. Another defeat may puncture his aura.
If India’s business cycles turn for the better, by 2019, the economy could be into overdrive and even without heroic reforms by the Modi government. This will make anti-incumbency a difficult platform from which to take on Modi in 2019. The major threat to the ruling dispensation can, therefore, will be from within, especially from the extremist Hindu groups in the fringes.
The BJP can’t afford to take things for granted. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, it could win 282 seats on an electoral support base of only 31 per cent—the lowest for any party that has won an absolute majority in Parliament.
This was primarily because the parties opposed to it—especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar—were divided. If the index of Opposition unity were to go up, it would pose a formidable challenge to the ruling party, and this has already been demonstrated in the byelections that took place in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar soon after the Lok Sabha elections.