A king-maker in waiting?

BACKSTAGE

Now they're friends, now they're not. The last big opposition unity effort was mounted during the election for the President of India. On that occasion, while the effort was to set up one opposition candidate against one NDA candidate, the move ended in fiasco.

The Left parties fielded Lakshmi Sehgal, the Congress set up its own candidate (Sushilkumar Shinde) and vacillated between supporting Abdul Kalam as a sop to their Muslim constituency. And the Samajwadi Party declared that the Left was anti-opposition and anti-people.

The People's Front, the Samajwadi Party said, was meant to oppose both the Congress and the BJP, but the Left parties "" that is, CPI (M) leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet "" propelled it Congress-wards and the Samajwadi Party walked out of it.

However, with the Lok Sabha election approaching, all that seems to have been forgotten as yet another unity effort appears to be struggling to get off the ground. Over the New Year, Samajwadi Party Chief Mulayam Singh Yadav called on Surjeet, the 80-something General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

This time the alliance might hold, for around the same time, Surjeet declared that there would be two alliances, one led by the Congress and the other led by non-Congress parties. This was manifestly an attempt not to repeat last time's mistake and proof that agility at 80 is not impossible.

Consider the past. Surjeet became general secretary after E M S Namboodiripad in 1992. At the 1998 CPI (M) party Congress in Kolkata, a proposal for a formal alliance with the Congress at the centre was discussed but rejected, mostly by leaders from Kerala. Dubbed the Surjeet-Jyoti Basu political line, this proposal had been floated by Basu, then West Bengal chief minister, earlier as well.

Although the norm is that if a general secretary's political line is rejected he resigns, the CPI (M) decided it could not do without Surjeet. The doughty Marxist Sikh has worked towards opposition unity tirelessly ever since. His efforts culminated in the statement made by him a few weeks ago that a two-front unity would represent the opposition against the BJP.

The CPI (M) has always been for the unification of the Third Front. This time, Surjeet's calculation is simple. Not only does he have to consolidate the Third Front and turn it into a set-up that will have no contradicting interests, but also turn it into a viable ruling formation.

Who knows, if neither the BJP nor the Congress can get sufficient numbers in the Lok Sabha, it is the Third Front that will have to take up the challenge of running the country, hopefully with a little bit of help from friends like the Congress from the outside.

But pragmatism is in order. Mulayam Singh Yadav will never support the Congress if the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party is a Congress ally. Surjeet realised that any hostility on the CPI (M)'s part would push Mulayam into the BJP's arms. Hence the idea of two fronts "" which will accommodate mutually-opposing interests at the same time ensuring these interests stay in the opposition.

Surjeet might not be popular because of the Left's tendency to use (radicalise, in their way of thinking) other organisations and ride piggyback to further the Left agenda. But his efforts at pushing forward opposition unity cannot be faulted.

With a committed Left vote that has neither increased nor decreased significantly, Surjeet's efforts need to be watched closely. A time could come when he may be the one who, along with his party, will decide who the prime minister of India should be.