Shaping political alliances

Opposition unity has suffered a setback

At their June 23 meeting in Patna, leaders of the 15 Opposition parties had reason to believe their parties had settled alliances in Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Bihar, and Jharkhand, while the crucial one in Uttar Pradesh (UP) was a work in progress. But a significantly deflated bunch of leaders will meet in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18. The Ajit Pawar-led faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) joining the Maharashtra government has dented unity efforts. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders predict the Janata Dal (United) in Bihar would do a similar carve-out. Meanwhile, the BJP is reviving the almost forgotten National Democratic Alliance (NDA), willing to embrace estranged and potential allies. The BJP’s focus is on roping in smaller, primarily caste-based parties in Maharashtra, Bihar, and UP.

Both the NDA and Opposition parties are focused on Maharashtra, undivided Bihar, and UP because of the 2019 Lok Sabha numbers. In 2019, of the 102 seats in Maharashtra, Bihar, and Jharkhand, the BJP and its allies, particularly the Janata Dal (United) and Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, both now in the anti-BJP camp, won 92. In UP, the alliance of the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party had the BJP drop nine seats from its 2014 tally. The BJP won about a dozen seats in UP with vote margins of under 50,000. Before the developments in Maharashtra, Opposition electoral arithmetic suggested Bihar and Jharkhand’s “grand alliance”, Maharashtra’s Maha Vikas Aghadi, a pragmatic index of Opposition unity elsewhere, particularly in UP, and a narrative based on livelihood issues could help whittle the BJP’s numbers by several dozen seats to mark a return to a coalition government.
 

However, the path from now to April 2024 is far from certain and things could change in ways that are difficult to predict. In the aftermath of the NCP split, the Congress quickly forgot the acrimony that marred the Patna meeting between its leaders and the head of the Aam Aadmi Party and invited Arvind Kejriwal to Bengaluru. In Maharashtra, BJP legislators face the irony of sitting alongside those whom their leaders until recently accused of corruption. In a speech in Bhopal to his party’s booth workers last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said NCP leaders were involved in scams worth ~70,000 crore. The Maharashtra political theatre has at least another act left. Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar on Saturday sought replies from 40 MLAs, including those of the Chief Minister Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, on why he should not terminate their Assembly membership.
 

It also remains to be seen to what extent the BJP or the NDA will benefit from the divide in the NCP. It is possible that the Ajit Pawar-led NCP will be battling across dozen-odd Lok Sabha seats in western Maharashtra and Marathwada against the faction led by his cousin Supriya Sule. Notably, the NCP has never won more than nine Lok Sabha and 71 Assembly seats since it was founded in 1999. Thus, given the political picture in Maharashtra, seat adjustments would not be easy for the NDA. As a senior NCP leader recently noted, pragmatism, not ideology, is the order of the day. The level of political pragmatism, to be sure, will be tested on both sides of the political divide many times over the coming months.