Which political parties in the country are likely to emerge as the third, fourth and fifth largest parties once the outcome of the elections is known on May 16? Could these three parties be led by three women, J. Jayalalithaa of the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Mamata Banerjee of the All-India Trinamool Congress and Mayawati of the Bahujan Samaj Party? Could these three women influence not just the complexion of the next government in Delhi but even determine who becomes the next Prime Minister?
Few doubt that the Bharatiya Janata Party will emerge as the single-largest political party followed by the Congress after the elections. However, contrary to what BJP spokespersons claim in public, many within the Hindu nationalist party concede in private that the chances of Narendra Modi becoming the next Prime Minister of India is dependent on whether the BJP is able to substantially improve on its performance in 1998 and 1999.
These same individuals acknowledge that even if a National Democratic Alliance coalition led by the BJP becomes the single-largest political formation, if such a group is crucially dependent on the post-poll support of at least one political party to cross the halfway mark of 272 MPs to obtain a majority in the Lok Sabha, this party could well extract its proverbial “pound of flesh” from the BJP by insisting that someone other than Mr Modi holds the top job. If such a denouement does indeed come to pass, the chief minister of Gujarat would be cut down to size after an election campaign where he has been projected as being bigger than his party.
In other words, if an NDA government is formed without Mr Modi as Prime Minister, it could be preceded by internal power realignment — perhaps even splintering, as political scientist Dhirubhai L. Sheth speculates — within the BJP as well as its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Under what circumstances could such a situation arise? If, for the sake of argument, Ms Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress or Ms Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK or Ms Mayawati’s BSP decide singly or together that it will not be in their interest to have Mr Modi as Prime Minister but someone else (again, for the sake of argument, say a woman like Sushma Swaraj), as a precondition for extending support (from outside or from within) to an NDA-like government, the BJP top brass would be in the horns of a huge dilemma.
Should the BJP forsake power if this happens? The ostensible reason why potential allies may not want Mr Modi as Prime Minister could be that Muslims are not favourably inclined towards him. Or it could simply be that a relatively “weak” Prime Minister would make it that much easier for allies to exert their influence on the new government that will be formed. It must be recalled that all the three parties mentioned have, at different points of time in the past, opportunistically been part of coalitions led by both the Congress and the BJP.
It is also important to remember two more sets of facts. In May 1996, Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government lasted all of 13 days because the BJP could not stitch together an alliance with at least 272 MPs. In April 1999, after the AIADMK withdrew support to the second government headed by Mr Vajpayee, it lost a vote of confidence in the lower house of Parliament with 543 members by a single vote.
It is true that history does not always repeat itself. But it is equally important to draw important lessons from the experience of the past. In the last five general elections held in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2009, the two largest political parties in the country, the Congress and the BJP put together (minus their pre- or post-poll coalition partners) won the following number of Lok Sabha seats (with respective vote shares): 301 (49.09 per cent), 323 (51.41 per cent), 296 (52.05 per cent), 283 (48.69 per cent) and 322 (47.35 per cent).
Put differently, approximately half of those who had voted in the past five elections did not vote for either the BJP or the Congress. This means that if the NDA does not have a majority, the support of the three parties, the AIADMK, the Trinamool Congress and the BSP, could become critical. In 2009, the AIADMK won only nine out of the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry; the Trinamool Congress and its ally, the Socialist Unity Centre of India, won 20 out of the 42 seats in West Bengal; and the BSP won 21 out of the 80 seats in Uttar Pradesh.
The three women who head these parties are all ambitious. Ms Mayawati has stated on many occasions that a dalit woman like her should become India’s PM.
The acronyms of the parties led by Ms Jayalalithaa and Ms Banerjee both begin with the letters “AI” or All India, indicating their aspirations although the footprints of the AIADMK and the Trinamool Congress do not extend very much beyond Tamil Nadu and West Bengal respectively.
These three political parties, as well as the Left, each hope to obtain around 30 seats in the next Lok Sabha, adding up to roughly 120 MPs. Whether their wishes will be fulfilled or not is another question altogether. Will past voting trends be replicated this time around? Will the desire for political stability matter to large numbers of voters spread across the length and breadth of the world’s most diverse population? And, before one forgets, there are at least five other political parties who may each have between 10 and 20 MPs. These are the Biju Janata Dal headed by Naveen Patnaik (with 14 out of 21 MPs from Orissa), the Samajwadi Party led by Mulayam Singh Yadav (22 out of 80 MPs from Uttar Pradesh), the Janata Dal (United) headed by Nitish Kumar (20 out of 40 MPs from Bihar), not to mention the two “new kids on the block”: the YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh and the Aam Aadmi Party.
The chances are high that the BSP and the SP will not be together in the same political formation, although both parties supported the Manmohan Singh government after the Trinamool Congress parted ways with the second United Progressive Alliance coalition in September 2012. Between 2004 and 2009, there were periods when both the Left and the Trinamool Congress supported the UPA government at the Centre although the two are bitter political opponents in West Bengal.
As the old saying goes, “we are like this only”. In India, anything is possible.
