A lot has transpired after the June 23 Opposition meeting in Patna. First and foremost, the new Opposition front has had to reschedule its next meeting date. It was to be held on July 13–14 in Bengaluru, but on Monday it was postponed to July 17–18.
Unlike the introductory meet-and-greet session in Patna, it appears that Opposition leaders have kept aside two full days in the tech city to thrash out an array of complex political and electoral issues that confronts them. But after the Sunday siesta-hour developments vis-à-vis the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra, a certain gloom has checkered their certitude and enthusiasm.
Interestingly, it was Sharad Pawar who had first announced the July 13–14 dates and venue of the second Opposition meeting, only a couple of days before his party plunged into a crisis. The original plan was to have the meeting in Shimla and Mallikarjun Kharge was to preside over it, but the change was communicated by Pawar. One wondered why Pawar had made the announcement when ideally it should have been Kharge. But one read it as Pawar’s fine game of upmanship and usurpation. It is now clear that Pawar was only trying to look busy while clearing up in advance his position with regard to the impending split in his party.
The new set of dates were communicated by the Congress’ K C Venugopal on Monday with a reassurance of “unwavering resolve to defeat the fascist and undemocratic forces”. That assertion captured the drift.
Just before the Maharashtra developments, a buoyant Narendra Modi, after his return from the United States, had put Opposition parties in a familiar quandary. He had wasted no time in bundling and branding them as scamsters and had simultaneously raised the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) agenda, which had left them scrambling for a response. The Congress’ dilemma was soon evident. It said the UCC was “undesirable at this stage”. It was not clear if it would become desirable at a later stage.
The Congress also said it will examine and react when it sees the draft bill or a report on the UCC issue. That may be very prudent, but it was also about putting off an awkward moment. This postponement suggested that the party would rather respond to the fine print and not the spirit or emotion that had forged the UCC idea—a divisive ideological item that has been on the to-do list of the Right for the longest period.
Anyway, the Sunday developments in Maharashtra will make it difficult for Sharad Pawar to focus on larger battles to save the nation when the ground beneath his feet has somewhat slipped. To that extent, the Opposition has lost the undivided attention of an experienced strategist. Pawar’s fate is now not dissimilar to that of Uddhav Thackeray, where one is not sure of what influence and infrastructure he commands in his own party.
Pawar has been excessively manipulative, and in his short and long political past, even his U-turns, rebellions, skulduggery and setbacks have been grandly touted as his own Machiavellian game and his own masterful script. He was always presented as a man never vulnerable but as one who always exploited the vulnerability of others. For the record, he had rebelled against Sonia Gandhi when she was most vulnerable in 1999.
The media image that Pawar created for himself over the decades has come to haunt him at this juncture. It makes him deeply suspect in the eyes of his colleagues and a citizenry that seeks Opposition unity. They are confused if the defections in Maharashtra were his own ingenuity or was a plot against him. Pawar, given his history, has no moral plank to stand on. As the lovely Shakespearean cliché goes, he may have been hoisted by his own petard. A sarcastic remark on social media after the Sunday events said: “And the Oscar goes to… Sharad Pawar.” That seemed to sum it up quite a bit.
Nitish Kumar has a similar reputation of being endlessly opportunistic. His deputy in the Bihar government, Tejaswi Yadav, had a lovely phrase for him in the past—“Paltu Chacha” (turncoat uncle). That very phrase was appropriated recently by Amit Shah at a Bihar rally. He called him “Paltu Babu”. How this history, circumstance and image of two of the shrewdest Opposition leaders will impact unity plans is an enormous riddle. None in the Bengaluru meeting will speak about the trust deficit the two have acquired but will be terribly cautious.
Most recently, Nitish did it with former prime minister H D Deve Gowda. He pursued Gowda for months for a merger of their respective Janata Dal units, but when it came to the June 23 Patna meeting, he conveniently chose to be influenced by the Congress. He did not even extend an invitation. If Nitish had kept Gowda, the nonagenarian patriarch of the Janata parivar, on his side, he wouldn’t have to suffer the humiliation of nominating himself as the future prime minister. Now, with the uncertainties that bog Opposition unity, Gowda seems to have had the last laugh and yet again, suspicions about Nitish appear very real.
That leaves Lalu Prasad Yadav to shoulder the responsibility of keeping the Opposition committed. But it is the current constituents of the Opposition themselves, chiefly the Congress, that made Lalu infructuous. He has been made more a political entertainer than a torch-bearer of Opposition unity. The same liberal elite that pine for the return of the Congress—and obnoxiously comment on the English accent of Narendra Modi—were the ones who spoke disgustingly about the antics and appearance of Lalu Yadav at one time. Now, they want to desperately resurrect him as a secular messiah, but he carries too much baggage. He, too, lived up to his image of acerbic frivolity on June 23 in Patna by speaking about Rahul Gandhi’s non-marriage and stubbornness. Like always, he managed a good laugh.
What the Opposition desperately needs is a moral anchor, like the one they had in Jayaprakash Narayan during the Emergency. So far, they have discovered none. If there is anyone with a stern moral voice among the lot that met in Pune, it is Rahul Gandhi. He is ideologically committed and may eventually choose not to sit with the potential B teams of the BJP.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author
(sugata@sugataraju.in)