The strange thing about this general election is that the voter does not know what kind of government s/he is voting for, for all party alignments seem transient. What the country gets at the end of the exercise could therefore be a government that no one wished for, or anticipated—much like the Deve Gowda government of 1996 (the then chief minister of Karnataka had not even stood for parliamentary election). It would seem that this is a game in two parts—the first is to win the votes, the second is to win power. And in the second phase, the Congress in particular is busy signaling that it will do anything to get to its goal, including break rival alliances.
Witness Sheila Dikshit’s statement on talks between the Congress and Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United), which is the BJP’s alliance partner. While Nitish Kumar himself has denied any such talks, Rahul Gandhi has come out in praise of the Bihar chief minister. The Congress signal to its erstwhile allies in Bihar (Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan) is clear—if you don’t win enough seats, we’re going with your bête noire. It might be argued that the Bihar duo have got their comeuppance, since they had refused to get into a seat-sharing agreement with the Congress, but overtures are also being made to Ms Jayalalithaa of the All-India Anna DMK. The signal is that the party is willing to dump its electoral ally and UPA partner, the DMK. The result is a new coolness in the Congress-DMK relationship, leading to the cancellation of Sonia Gandhi’s visit to Tamil Nadu. Meanwhile, Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress has reacted like a scalded cat to Rahul Gandhi’s suggestion that the Congress could get back together with the Communists.
The state parties too have left voters in doubt about their real alignments. The AIADMK is supposedly with the Third Front, as is Ms Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, but both have stayed away from important Third Front jamborees, so the signals are decidedly mixed. Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal too seems to be a part of the Third Front, but its spokesmen have asserted that the party will go with whoever forms the government in New Delhi—which could mean a change of horses for the former NDA ally. If there is any party which has not played the game of shifting alliances so far, it is the BJP (which may have learnt its lesson, having paid the price in 2004 for switching from the DMK to the AIADMK just before the election, only to face a rout in Tamil Nadu). But while everything could be said to be in the melting point, nothing is stranger than Mulayam Singh Yadav, the champion of Muslims in UP, coming together with Kalyan Singh, who was the BJP’s UP chief minister when the Babri Masjid was pulled down. But who knows whether even stranger things will happen on the morrow?
