The Congress now seems to be in the same shoes as the Bharatiya Janata Party, when it comes to losing allies. If the BJP has lost the All-India Anna DMK and the Telugu Desam to the Third Front, and fallen out with the Biju Janata Dal while barely hanging on to the Shiv Sena, the Congress has now lost all its allies in the crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — the Samajwadi Party (Mulayam Singh), the Rashtriya Janata Dal (Lalu Prasad) and the Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas Paswan). It also seems to be in danger of losing the Pattali Makkal Katchi, which has an influential caste base in northern Tamil Nadu. In Maharashtra, it has been able to hold on to the Nationalist Congress Party only by conceding it more constituencies in the apportionment of the 48 that are there in the state.
It is now crystal clear that the two main political parties have been pushed to the wall by their allies, virtually all of whom have driven hard bargains. It was the hardening stance of the allies that first forced the Congress to declare some weeks ago that it would not have any national-level alliances, only local arrangements at state level. Now, the party has been forced to strike a pose of bravado and assert that it will fight alone — a choice that was forced on it after Lalu Prasad of the RJD and Ram Vilas Paswan of the LJP sealed their alliance and cut the Congress out of the deal. The bravado is unconvincing because the party has so far been unable to build a strong grassroot base in nearly half a dozen states (UP, Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat), which between them account for 40 per cent of all Lok Sabha seats. That would explain why the party has been flexible enough to cobble together an agreement with the troublesome Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, and hopes to do a deal with the DMK in Tamil Nadu. Indeed, it could be argued that a combined DMK-Congress front in the state is likely to get the better of even the AIADMK-PMK combination. More importantly, without the alliance with the DMK, the Congress might as well kiss good-bye to virtually all the 39 seats in Tamil Nadu.
Since the national parties are the weaker partners in almost all the local alliances, a split of alliance votes might be expected to lead to greater losses for them. However, they have less at stake too, in that the Congress won very few seats in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in 2004; so even if it were to suffer a setback following the departure of its allies, axiomatically its losses will be limited. Conversely, the state-wise allies have more at stake, whereas their upside is limited. Arguably, Mulayam Singh and his Samajwadi Party could get pretty much wiped out if the party fights without the help of the Congress, against a Bahujan Samaj Party that won more than half the Assembly seats in UP in the last state elections.
The smaller parties may well have been emboldened by the formation of the Third Front, for which the CPI(M)’s Prakash Karat has been the principal mover. This gives state-level parties an option that they did not have in any of the last three Lok Sabha elections. What remains to be seen is how the voter reacts to these pre-election moves. Will most voters vote in line with their identity (defined in religious or caste terms), or will they see the danger to stability at the Centre and plump for the big national parties? On the answer to that key question hinges the issue of whether the country will have an effective government, two months hence.