UPA's coalition tactics weak

If this round of Assembly elections represented the first test of the relative ability of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), to run a coalition on a scale of 10, the NDA gets seven and the Congress fails with three.

The NDA fought as a seamless alliance with minimal loss of votes and seats on account of the rebel factor in Bihar.

Its constituents, the Janata Dal (United) and the BJP, achieved a perfect understanding in most seats and where there was danger of rebels spoiling the show, leaders like Arun Jaitely and Pramod Mahajan intervened on the spot and worked out a solution.

By contrast, while the UPA started with the same advantage"" that the Congress, the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Lok Janashakti party (LJP) and the Left parties were part of the same vehemently anti-communal front ""their efforts to run a common election campaign premised on the issue of fighting communalism, collapsed even before the campaign gained ground.

After 15 years of rule by the RJD, the Congress in the state made a brave bid to distance itself from the whiplash of the anti-incumbency working against the RJD.

Instead of making this the issue on which it would fight against the state government, it attempted to run a higgledy-piggledy campaign in which Congress chief Sonia Gandhi mutedly criticised the law and order situation in Bihar, while at the same time, emphasising that secularism must be defended.

The Congress and the RJD did not put up candidates against each other in seats where the other had won in the 2000 poll, but under pressure from its local unit the Congress nevertheless put up candidates in 80 constituencies in supposedly "friendly" fights against the RJD.

The LJP, which had been fuming against Lalu ever since Ramvilas Paswan was done out of the railway portfolio, set up candidates against its secular allies all over Bihar.

The Congress was torn between behaving as the responsible elder statesman of the alliance and using this chance to break free of the shackles of Lalu.

Halfway through the election, the party's leadership warned that the balance of advantage of the fractured vote banks could go the BJP and tried frantically to pull out its candidates from seats, where it anticipated they would damage the RJD.

The net result was complete confusion in the electorate and a breakdown of the principle of coalition. The Left also turned its guns against Lalu, criticising his law and order record. In the Congress-led coalition, the fence began eating the grass.

This could be a lesson for the UPA in the 2006 West Bengal and Kerala Assembly elections. Here the stakes for the Congress are not high. It is running a government in Kerala that it is tipped to lose and in West Bengal, it has minimal stakes.