Coalition experiments

In the early 1960s, socialist firebrand Ram Manohar Lohia proposed a new theory of anti-Congressism. As the party which had come to exemplify the freedom movement and whence the top leaders came from, the Congress naturally won the first few elections and all of them in the states soon after. It appeared invincible and was set to dominate the political landscape for all time to come. That would leave no space for any other dispensation.

Lohia suggested that all Opposition parties come together as a united front and ensure that only one common candidate was put up to face the Congress wherever possible. That way the votes would not be divided. The strategy paid off huge dividends — in 1967, the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal (SVD), the joint front of the small Opposition parties, won no less than nine states, shaking up the Congress. From the socialist parties to the Jan Sangh, the SVD became a formidable entity simply because their joint votes were more than the Congress Party’s.

Non-Congressism bec-ame an ideology in itself. Within months, however, the SVD governments began to fall, imploding under the weight of their own inner contradictions, riven by ego problems and ideological conflicts. For the socialists, the Jan Sangh was a communal party, for the latter, the lefties were anti-capitalist and thus anathema. The experiment did not last, but a new template was set.

Thus, when the Emergency ended and elections were announced, it was relatively easy to create the Janata Party because the idea had been tried earlier. Under the mentorship of Jayaprakash Narayan, politicians as different as socialist George Fernandes, Sanghi Atal Behari Vajpayee, farmers’ leader Charan Singh and Congress rebels like Jagjivan Ram all came together to fight Indira Gandhi. The Janata Party won, but right away there was a fight for the prime ministership and soon after, the Jan Sangh fell out because of their membership of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which the other parties resented. Indira Gandhi was back in power in less than three years. It was not until 1989 that the next non-Congress government was formed at the Centre.

It is useful to know a bit of history of modern Indian politics as one contemplates the political landscape today. In May 2014, the BJP won a handsome victory and correspondingly, the Congress, after leading a coalition for 10 years, fell to a meagre 44 MPs, its lowest number in Parliament.

And soon after, the BJP started announcing to the world that it was now the default Indian party of power and the others would have to fight it, both at the Centre and in the states. Just three months later, the BJP has put up a poor show in bypolls, including in Bihar where it shocked everyone by decimating Lalu Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), to say nothing of the Congress. So what changed?

These three parties came together to form a new alliance and put up one candidate who gathered all the non-BJP votes. In multi-cornered contests, any party which can muster even 25 odd per cent of the votes can walk away with victory, but the rest, united, can put paid to that.

So encouraged are regional political parties that they are already dreaming of many similar alliances in other states. Why not one between the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Congress so that the BJP does not win in Uttar Pradesh? Their combined force would not just resist but perhaps demolish the BJP in the forthcoming elections. The SP and the BSP are sworn enemies, but so were Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar and they still came together.

It is a compelling idea and as we realise, there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the great white hope of Indian politics, was supported on one side by the BJP and the other by the Left parties, both driven by their visceral dislike of the Congress; a decade later, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) backed the Manmohan Singh-led UPA. Take this argument further, and one might even begin to fantasise about a Mamata Banerjee-Left-Congress love fest. All to defeat the BJP, which is now becoming a political threat all over India.

But the SVD and the Janata Party experiments (and the several Fronts since then) tell us that antipathy towards one party cannot be a sufficient glue to hold together a coalition. Tactical alliances work only in the short term, but ultimately a party has to present a cogent reason why it is a good proposition for the voters. At this stage, we do not know if the Lalu-Nitish-Congress grouping will last till the state Assembly elections in 2014; certainly the BJP will do its very best to break it. Moreover, the Congress, which sees itself as a proper national party, will not easily enter into alliances with regional groups unless it has a dominating role in them. It took the Congress a long time to understand the coalition dharma.

The BJP is on a roll and at this moment looks set to grow in states such as West Bengal, Assam and Jammu and Kashmir. It is bursting with confidence about the forthcoming elections. The call for a “Congress-mukt Bharat” reflects its growing conviction that over the next few years, it will be the only national political force in the country.

But it is not without weaknesses. Its ambitious plans are not just making regional parties nervous but also putting off its allies, as the break up of the agreement with the Haryana Janhit Congress shows.

The Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal are also getting restless at the BJP’s aggressive attitude. There are problems within the upper echelons of the BJP. Most of all, the Modi government will have to meet sky high expectations — a slip up there could dent the BJP’s electoral support. The results of the

recent bypolls are a wakeup call it should heed.

But electoral alliances of the kind seen in Bihar are not the best way to fight it. They are at best good tactical weapons, but rarely work in the long term.

Ultimately political parties have to strengthen their bases by themselves and go out on their own and take on the challenge. The BJP is now what the Congress used to be, but as we have seen, even the mightiest tree can shake and then fall.