by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
The routing of the opposition in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections by the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a stunning effect which will not subside anytime soon.
The initiative that Congress president Sonia Gandhi began since April to meet individual opposition leaders—from Sharad Pawar to CPM’s Sitaram Yechuri, both Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav of Bihar, or West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee—is a direct fallout of the defeat in Uttar Pradesh.
However, it is the seemingly irresistible rise of BJP, and the anxiety that it may after all change the rules of the game of politics set in the past decades, that has spread across the length and breadth of the country. In Chennai, the possibility of matinee idol Rajanikanth carrying the flag of BJP into peninsular India has made the Opposition worried. It lent to the birthday of nonagenarian leader K. Karunanidhi, into a matter of national urgency, on the scale of Udyog Parvin the Mahabharata. In Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party leader and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has resumed calling BSP supremo and his sworn enemy Mayawati “bua” and they are talking again directly now. Besides, unfazed by the new anti-corruption inquiries he is facing, Lalu Yadav is holding a joint rally of opposition parties in Patna on August 27, its battle cry being “BJP hatao, desh bachao”.
Nevertheless, achieving opposition unity is easier said than done. It’s because it was hopelessly disunited to begin with, so much so that the BJP could manage to come to power in 2014 due to, inter alia, its disunity. The vote share of NDA was 38 per cent yet it bagged 336 (61.87%) of the 543 Lok Sabha seats.
And now, after the UPA parties’ misfortune, their internal problems have compounded. Mayawati is no longer the monarch of her Jatav community as the Dalit youths of Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, have taken their destiny in their own hands instead of leaving it to BSP. They were oppressed by the rich and armed and politically influential Rajputs. Now they have formed Bhim Sena which promises to become the community’s new platform. Within SP, the Yadav family tussle involving Akhilesh and Mulayam Singh Yadav, his father and the party’s founder, is far from being resolved. Also doubtful is the Congress’ ability to project itself any longer as the ‘natural cradle’ of potential prime ministers. Sonia Gandhi’s ‘unity luncheon’ (for selecting opposition candidate for President election), coinciding with the NDA government’s third anniversary, skipped by Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, was an impressive photo-op, and just about that.
In fact, Nitish rubbed it in by abstaining from Sonia’s conclave yet meeting the Prime Minister over lunch the very next day. Pawar was present at the lunch but he’d earlier turned down Sonia’s call-in to be UPA’s presidential candidate. “The job comes with a great house but I enjoy talking to you”, he later told journalists. Obviously, the job he’s aspiring to is to lead the next government from Parliament, not Rashtrapati Bhavan. Nitish Kumar, too, has got his sight set on the prime minister’s job. In his earlier meeting with Sonia, he’d recommended a second term for Pranab Mukherjee, the outgoing President. However, he said little about the nature and leadership of a future opposition alliance. The Congress is desperately looking for an alliance with H D Deve Gowda in Karnataka. But Gowda is deeply hurt as the Congress government had put his son H D Kumaraswamy in jail. He did attend Sonia’s lunch after persuaded by Sharad Yadav and Sitaram Yechuri. But no further political deal in Karnataka.
The opposition turf has no shortage of vaulting ambition, inflated ego, or pulses racing doe to Modi’s taxmen and cops closing in on piles of allegedly ill-gotten cash. But that doesn’t a leader make. The big change that has hit the electoral process in democracies worldwide is that it has become almost entirely personality oriented, like in the presidential system, with little room for the opposition except that of “also ran”. Most recently, it has happened in France, with centrist and globalist Emmanuel Macron getting 66 per cent votes while Marine Le Pen, the right-wing populist being left with only 34 per cent. What’s noteworthy is that Macron, who had been the finance minister in the previous socialist government of Francoise Hollande (something comparable in its ineptitude and venality to the Manmohan Singh-led UPA-2), quit it, formed his fledgling party En Marche, and targeted and grabbed his bull’s-eye—the huge middle ground that’d shiver to support Hollande’s party yet would have voted for Le Pen if there was no option.
Incidentally, Britain is heading for a similar situation as it goes to poll on Thursday, June 8. In this mid-term poll, the British voter will be caught between prime minister Theresa May’s pro-Brexit Conservative Party and the Labour under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a rather loopy communist who worships Venezuelan ex-president the late Hugo Chavez and says if elected PM he’d nationalize mail, rail and energy firms. That’s a bit too much in a nation that still respects Margaret Thatcher, the ‘iron lady’ of privatization, and the country reshaped by her. The country became the bedrock on which two ‘new Labour’ PMs, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, could thrive. Corbyn is a hater of their ‘neo-liberalism’ while May is clearly devoid of political ideas. Therefore, it is likely that, come June 8, voters will move one way in large herds but none will be there to represent the sensible middle ground. Significantly, Macron polled 84 per cent of the top 20 per cent highest educated voters.
India did not (and does not) have a Macron-type leader primarily because it lacks enlightened voters. But that is no excuse for leaders being so bereft of ideas about the direction that India may follow. When called upon to govern states, their ideas are limited to banning alcohol, or denying land to industry. It’s not Modi’s opposition, India is waiting for his challenger.
