by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
The next general election is not happening before 2019 but it seems some opposition leaders can’t wait to bang the war drum. In other words, they have been thinking that the 2014 mandate in favour of Narendra Modi and the BJP got screwed up for one reason or the other, and that it must be rectified now. The challengers to Modi’s election are three in number, call it a trinity, if you like, but each of them thinks that it is he who deserved to get the job in 2019.
The loudest, and perhaps crankiest is Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, whose interminable battle with Delhi Lieutenant Governor, his nearest visible representative of the Modi-led Central Government, recently caused a strike by municipal garbage removers. Delhi became the stink capital of the world as a result. However, the real trouble with Kejriwal is not his querulous ways alone. It is his delusions of invincibility caused by a “freak total victory” in Delhi earlier this year. Kejriwal promised to solve all the problems of Delhites, often by doing things way beyond his jurisdiction, like halving the power tariff. They thought Kajriwal was the answer. The AAP’s performance is before them now. But Kejriwal is unfazed as his mind is stuck on an ‘Arab spring’ kind of power transfer, which is anarchic and is blind to what may lie beyond it (the fate of post-Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt is an example).
After all, he won 67 of Delhi’s 70 assembly seats after losing all seven Lok Sabha seats. But he seems to have misread the numbers. The settled population of Delhi treat the ‘assembly’ election of the so-called state as merely local-self government. The people were fed up with BJP-ruled three Corporations and failure of the LG to change the face of the city during the 9 months rule of the Central government. Perhaps, Kejriwal is working on a plan and confronting Modi on every minor issue. But its a long road ahead and Lok Sabha is another matter where well-informed citizens exercise their franchise in large numbers across the country. Having missed this point, Kejriwal is still nursing his hurt pride. Since his den also happens to be the country’s capital, a big showdown in the city may have a crippling impact on the entire nation, which is a worry that Modi cannot but live with.
Rahul Gandhi, vice president of the Congress, is another leader who perhaps feels that Modi has got by stealth the job that rightly belonged to him. His ego got fanned by 10 Janpath insiders, from his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi to former minister Jairam Ramesh. Within the party, there were persistent doubts about his ability to lead the party through a period of intense socio-political transition. A section even thought that the principle of dynastic succession of leadership has gone long past its shelf-life. But time was needed to dismantle the age-old system of holding a particular family as royalty and to introduce an inner-party democracy modelled particularly on Britain and France (with Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton becoming front-runners for the Republicans the Democrats respectively in the next US presidential election, the richest country seems to be taking a U-turn to family rule). But those who wanted Rahul as the next Congress boss gave no time to dissenters.
As expected, Rahul Gandhi is in a hurry to comment on every national issue but his research is shallow. The land acquisition bill, for which he called the government of Modi “suit boot ki sarkar”, may have become the opposition’s punching box. But it is doubtful if the rural poor are much threatened by it. According to a factsheet put out for members of Parliament in 2013, in the previous 50 years there were around 21.3 million development-induced IDPs (internally displaced persons) of whom those displaced by dams were 16.4 million while industrial development accounted for only 1.25 million. From the above figures, it is evident that land acquisition in India has mainly served the interest of the big and middle farmer whose profits have improved with better irrigation. Far from being “suit boot” people, they constitute the rural middle class and strongly influence voting in the rural areas. But Rahul is fixated on the bill’s UPA version crafted by Ramesh, the then land revenue minister. Rahul has become restless. During Delhi’s garbage removers’ strike, he advised them to continue with their movement which affected mostly the gloomy trans-Yamuna areas while the surroundings of his posh bungalow in Lutyen’s Delhi remained prim as ever.
Neither Kejriwal nor Rahul is a strategic schemer. But Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is a different kettle of fish. Hugely ambitious, and clever, he fancied himself as the post-UPA prime minister until the sudden rise of Modi in 2012, which upset his calculation and pushed him into breaking off with NDA, a 15-year-old association. And now he has formed an alliance with Lalu Yadav, his sworn enemy all these years. He is obviously aiming at a wide alliance of intermediate (Yadav, Kurmi, Koeri) castes. The strategy may work if BJP fails to unite upper caste support with that of dalits. At any rate, with Lalu by his side for the time being at least, he may be no pushover as he became to the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections.
Bihar is a bellwether state. If Modi can wrest its control, it will not only bring him oodles of confidence but will silence his critics who insist that he is losing touch on most issues. But it will be disastrous for him if Nitish Kumar is retained. Regarded as a good administrator who ended Lalu’s ‘jungle raj’ in Bihar, and the first NDA’s reformer railway minister who introduced e-tickets, a big hit, Kumar is also not an untouchable in the Hindutva fold. Of the trinity, it is Nitish Kumar on whom Modi should keep a weather eye.
