People are pushing the Oppn to unite

For the Opposition parties, the recent byelection results of Uttar Pradesh — for the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha — have imparted a big psychological boost right on the heels of the Karnataka Assembly election, and the impact of this is already visible in the credible efforts of the Congress and Mayawati’s BSP to forge an alliance in the North Indian states that will have state polls later in the year. In Karnataka, the Congress and the JD(S), although they fought as bitter rivals in the poll campaign, were able to stitch up a post-poll government without much ado. There was evidently popular sanction for this as the BJP was unable to buy up a single Congress or JD(S) MLA, though the governor did his best to promote the evil practice of horse-trading in the saffron party’s favour. 

In a fundamental way it is this that brought top Opposition leaders in droves to Bengaluru for the swearing-in of Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy. The people appeared to be prodding the non-BJP parties in a certain direction. Even TD leader N. Chandrababu Naidu came, although his relations with the Congress look far from congenial — a throwback to the history of some years — although this could change, depending on the moves the BJP makes in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and how capable the saffron party appears to be in the TDP supremo’s calculation.

In Kairana in western UP, the Jat sugarcane farmer voted and made victorious RLD’s Muslim candidate. RSS affiliates and the BJP had incited the terrible communal riot in the nearby Muzaffarnagar area in late 2013, months before the last Lok Sabha election in order to polarise votes along religious lines, and slogans such as love jihad and Hindu migration on account of Muslim atrocities were falsely circulated. This tragic history was buried and the BJP humbled in last week’s byelections. The impact of the BSP, RLD and the SP pooling forces became self-evident, with the Congress chipping in with its minor voteshare in UP. The Kairana (Lok Sabha) and Noorpur (Assembly) byelection results were built on the SP-BSP consolidation seen in March for Phulpur and Gorakhapur parliamentary byelections. The trend seems a continuing one. 

It is this which has given impetus to the recent moves — which seem to be in an advanced stage — of the Congress sharing space with the BSP in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, although the BSP has a very minor voteshare in these states and the principal fight is between the Congress and BJP. But eventually for the non-BJP parties, the principal coordination difficulties would lie in UP, where in the last Lok Sabha and Assembly election the BJP swept practically everything in view. If BJP’s opponents can combine in UP, the saffron party can be pushed to the margins, the arithmetic of polls supplementing the anti-Modi chemistry that looks to be setting in.