Samajwadi Party, RLD submit letters to Kalam

MANDATE 2004

In an unexpected development, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) yesterday submitted letters of support to the Congress-led coalition, underscoring the fact that they were doing so because of their committment to the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and the CPI.

Party General Secretary Amar Singh said the SP and the RLD considered themselves part of the Left alliance and appreciated the efforts the Left had made to ensure they were part of a secular alternative to the BJP. In order to honour those efforts, Amar Singh said they had decided to become part of the alliance.

He clarified that the SP and the RLD would support the Congress on the same terms as the Left parties, which means they will not join the government but support it from outside.

The SP said the Congress-led coalition could be "unstable" if major allies and supporting parties remained outside.

"It could be unstable," Amar Singh told reporters when asked how stable could be the new coalition if parties having a total strength of over 100 members extended only outside support.

Noting that running a coalition meant managing contradictions, he said there were contradictions in West Bengal, Kerala, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh as some parties supporting the coalition were rivals in the states with the party leading the government at the Centre.

The SP has a strength of 36 in the Lok Sabha and its ally the RLD has three MPs.

Amar Singh said that his party was not "hungry" for power and at the same time he asserted that "no one can wish us away."

"Coalition is a game of give and take," he said, adding, "The government in power has the duty to take along all its constituents."

Singh said "my personal opinion" was that the SP should not join the government, but the parliamentary board of the party had authorised party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav to take a decision.

However, he added that no decision would be taken without consulting the Left and CPI(M) General Secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet.

As regards the common minimum programme being formulated for the coalition, he said the SP would give its suggestions only if asked for by the Left parties.

The SP leader hit out at the BJP for raising the foreign origin issue when Sonia Gandhi was set to take over as prime minister.

However, two things were immediately clear. The SP move to attend the dinner by Congress President Sonia Gandhi last night without being invited to it, showed how deep the animus between the SP and the Congress is.

Apart from not forgiving the SP for letting down the Congress and allies in 1999 in their abortive bid to form a government, Sonia has also not forgotten that the support base of the SP and the Congress in Uttar Pradesh is common and tying up with the part can only mean surrender of ground by the Congress.

However, the SP has compulsions of its own. It needs to preempt the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) from joining the Congress-led alliance, thereby forcing the BSP to look at the BJP alliance as its only political option.

If the BSP had come to the Congress earlier, the Congress could have got access to the entire, transferable Dalit vote, something that would have decimated the SP in Uttar Pradesh.

By forcing its way into the Congress-led alliance through the Left, the SP is conscious that it has left the Congress with no real choice but to keep the BSP out. This could have long term implications in politics at the Centre as well as in Uttar Pradesh.