The response by several political parties to the Congress losing Haryana is not in the least surprising. It just happened that this Haryana development came the way of other political parties who constitute the INDI Alliance (INDIA) and the opportunity was seized. It would have happened anyway over a period of time till the next Lok Sabha elections.
It is not as though INDIA has come apart and the Opposition is in disarray because of the potshots being taken at the Congress. INDIA was carefully crafted mainly for this year’s Lok Sabha elections and if possible, for them to stay together for Assembly elections. “If possible” is the crux. Only two such elections are ahead, Jharkhand and Maharashtra.
In Maharashtra the INDIA, in its form and content, would stay together because of the compulsions of three parties – Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, and the Congress itself. Congress could be seen as having lost some heft because of its poor performance in Haryana. Unless they stay together, the game would be likely lost there.
The Mahayuti of which Eknath Shinde is the chief minister with BJP and Ajit Pawar’s NCP are doing everything possible to entice voters with lures like the Laadki Bahina which transfers Rs 1,500 a month to over two crore women, all of them of voting age though spread across political parties. It has been issuing a series of Government Resolutions which favour someone or some section, several cabinet decisions are announced almost every day.
Against this all-giving state government, the Opposition has to stay united or lose quite some. This election is more to prove that the three Maharashtra parties are original and those that BJP helped split are pretenders. It is a desperate bid to both underscore their identity and ensure their existence. These are local issues, but the overarching presence of Narendra Modi would be of great significance.
Alliances at the local level during state Assembly elections are the rule and make eminent sense. One main reason is that political parties who don’t have a particular presence in a state cannot transfer its vote to another because it has no votes to transfer. Of what use would a party like Trinamool Congress be to the DMK in Tamil Nadu during an Assembly election? Or the National Congress of J&K to the Bharat Rashtra Party in Telangana?
Nominal tie-ups only give a sense of unity but it matters very little at the polling booths. If Arvind Kejriwal stands up on the podium at a rally in Hyderabad for the Congress, it says the AAP is with him. It is a show of solidarity. A tie-up with CPI in any state gets such an alliance brings some transferable votes on the table for it, like the CPM has some presence in almost all Assembly constituencies.
First to tick off the Congress was the Aam Aadmi Party because it has to have its strategy worked out for the Delhi Assembly elections which are just months away. Though it has as many as five states where at least one legislator is from the party, Delhi is the core of its being. It would not like to lose the grip over the small but important state where it has the largest proportion of seats.
No other party has such strength in any Assembly as the AAP does in Delhi followed by the large presence with a decisive majority in Punjab. Goa, Gujarat with five MLAs, and now Jammu and Kashmir with one each are the other. Delhi government run by AAP is a nettling presence to the BJP-headed Centre. AAP is sore that alliance with Congress didn’t help in Delhi for the Lok Sabha polls. Also because it was belittled in Haryana during seat-sharing.
That explains why AAP is keen on having its say in Delhi without being trammeled. It called Congress an “overconfident” party while the BJP was described as “arrogant”. Of course, Congress in turn can, after the failure of talks with AAP, use the appellation for the AAP: “over-demanding”. That sits well in the context of Haryana. In Delhi, AAP wants to call the shots.
Omar Abdullah has publicly limited himself to asking the Congress to introspect; only a day earlier he thanked Congress for its role in alliance in J&K but now says the alliance was so only in voter perception. CPI has asked the party to do the same and highlighted the potential risks to the Opposition which had come close to reviving itself in the Lok Sabha.
Mamata Banerjee is of the opinion that Congress was a party that could do well by accommodating those who signed up for INDIA but hers has always been a love-hate relationship with the grand old party. We have seen the friction between the Trinamool Congress and the Congress during the Lok Sabha polls itself.
The late Bal Thackeray had put it across nicely when, soon after the Vajpayee-led government could not return, he said he did not worry because some parties had even stopped talking of the NDA then. Just wait, he had said, when power seems likely close, these parties would band together again. Exigencies of circumstance are good glue. Rest of the time, they will be preoccupied with local issues. Thackeray was so right.
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