by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Special Report 

Mahagathbandhan is Dead, Long Live Gathbandhan

Pawar tells Rahul: No Opposition conclaves, state-level rallies only

Harish Gupta

New Delhi, Jan 14

It is now gradually becoming clear that there will be no “Grand Alliance” (Mahagathbandhan) of 22 Opposition parties at the national level. There will be no joint rallies or joint campaigning in states by top leaders of Opposition parties.

Highly placed sources say the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Sharad Pawar has suggested that it would be better to avoid holding joint rallies of Opposition leaders across the country. Rather, the parties should concentrate in states and constituencies wherever they are strong to work together and ensure the victory of their respective candidates. The joint rallies should be held only at the state level wherever needed and whenever required.

Sharad Pawar was at pains to explain to the Congress president Rahul Gandhi that the BJP would like to make this Lok Sabha polls as “Modi VS All” and paint a holier than thou image. The images of 22 leaders coming together at some recent conclaves to oust PM Modi should be avoided, at least for now.

The recent successes of low-key low-voltage campaigns in byelections and Assembly polls exposed the chinks in the BJP's armoury.

Rahul Gandhi had met Sharad Pawar at least four times and during one of the recent interactions, the veteran NCP leader felt that instead of “Grand alliance” the focus should be on “alliances in states” only.

Since Congress and NCP have already clinched an alliance in Maharashtra in-principle, its time to clinch alliances in other states too. The Congress Party has clinched an in-principle alliance in Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir. Though there is no state-level alliance in UP with SP and BSP, these leaders feel that this was more a tactical move than keeping Congress in check. This move is aimed at keeping the entire Upper castes votes going over to the BJP in UP. There will be more localised adjustment of seats in UP wherever required, a source said.

The Congress has to sort out its problem in West Bengal where its in a dilemma whether to go it alone or with the CPM or Mamata Banerjee. It also has to overcome teething problems in states like Gujrat and in Karnataka where it has formed government with the Janata Dal (S). It is also facing problems in alliances/adjustment/understanding in Delhi, Punjab etc. with AAP.

It is in this context that Pawar suggested that no nation wide joint rallies or conclaves be held and such campaigns be confined to states only. Though Sharad Pawar was not immediately available for comments, senior NCP leader Praful Patel said its time to consolidate the gains and discussions on these lines have been held. He refused to say anything further on the issue.

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After Maharashtra, Congress seals Bihar deal with RJD others

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

A Lokmat exclusive report

After Maharashtra, Congress seals Bihar deal with RJD others 

Kirti Azad, Shatrughan Sinha to quit BJP soon ?

Harish Gupta

New Delhi, Jan. 10

After Maharashtra, its the turn of Bihar where Lok Sabha seat sharing arrangement by the Congress with its major allies has virtually been frozen.

Highly placed sources in the Congress say that Mahagathbandhan parties have come to an understanding that 40 Lok Sabha seats will be shared amongst the allies with the sole objective of defeating the BJP-JD(U)-LJP alliance.

Highly placed sources told Lokmat that the final announcement about seat sharing deal is likely to be made only after January 15-16.

The contours of alliances have been finalised after several parleys among the leaders in Delhi, Patna and Ranchi jail where Lalu is presently lodged. It transpires that it was Congress Rajya Sabha MP Akhilesh Prasad Singh who was a catalyst in the Opposition unity operation in Bihar. He was instrumental in bringing Upendra Kushwaha to the Opposition fold and made him quit the Modi government. It was Akhilesh who took Kushwaha to senior Congress leader Ahmad Patel and later Rahul Gandhi. He also arranged his meeting with Lalu in Ranchi jail. Sources say that the deal with Kushwaha was clinched assuring him of six seats. He had got five seats in the NDA though could win three only. He wanted six seats and Lalu agreed to give him the same. The Congress wants to contest 12 seats but at present, 11 seats have been committed to it.

As per the deal, the RJD contesting 19 seats, Congress 11, Upendra Kushwaha's RLSP six seats, HAM of Jitan Ram Manjhi two and Sharad Yadav will contest one seat. The 40th seat may go to Mukesh Sahni who joined the Mahagathbandhan. It has also been agreed if some formidable leader quit the JD (U) or the BJP, seats will be to him either by the Congress or the RJD.

It is learnt that some of the dissident BJP leaders Kirti Azad (Darbhanga) and Shatrughan Sinha (Patna) may also be accommodated from the seats of their choice if they finally quit the party. Shatrughan Sinha 's services may be used as a star campaigner by the alliance partners in Bihar and elsewhere and he may contest from Delhi instead of Bihar.

The Congress is keen that alliances are finalised in every state as soon as possible so that candidates' selection process could be initiated. It has sealed the deal in Maharashtra and now clinched in Bihar.

Ends

Kushwaha to join Mahagathbandhan

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Lokmat Exclusive report

Kushwaha to join Mahagathbandhan

Contest Lok Sabha polls with Congress-RJD in Bihar alliance sealed

Harish Gupta

New Delhi, Dec 18

Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) chief Upendra Kushwaha, who quit the Modi government and snapped his ties with the BJP, is set to join the Congress-led Mahagathbandhan.

Highly placed sources told Lokmat today that Kushwaha has finally made up his mind to join hands with Congress-RJD Mahagathbandhan in Bihar.

Though he had said last week that he has "many options" before him. But he decided to go with the Congress and the RJD in Bihar. A formal announcement in this regard is likely to be made in a couple of days.

These sources also say that the RLSP may be given five Lok Sabha seats in Bihar under the alliance out of the 40 seats. He will have to accept the leadership of Tejashwi for the post for the Chief Minister. He had held a prolonged meeting with senior Congress leaders Ahmed Patel and Akhilesh Prasad Singh last week.

He declined to answer queries on all three of RLSP members in Bihar's bicameral legislature raising a banner of revolt, accusing him of pursuing his "personal interests" and declaring that they would remain in the NDA.

The Congress Party is of the view that Upendra Kushwaha is the leader of the party and has following among the 6% of backwards belonging to his community. Though there has been split in the party as both the MLA and MLC joined the Nitish Kumar camp, Kushwaha is the leader of the community.

With the joining of the RLSP the Mahagathbandhan, it now becomes a G-22 (Group of 22 parties).

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'Luv and Kush' winning battles

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, the inseparable duos from Modi’s years as Gujarat chief minister. Like Luv and Kush, the warrior brothers, their partnership is mainly forged on (electoral) battlegrounds. But it has matured over the decades, with their voyage from Sabarmati to Ganga. Just how much power they pack in their punch came to light, for the second time after the 2014 general election, along the entire upper stretch of the Ganga last week, with the BJP campaign steered by the duo. They captured 379 of the 473 seats in the two assemblies of Uttarakhand (70) and Uttar Pradesh (403). That’s more than half the land washed by the “sacred river”.

Like Luv and Kush, they have issues to settle. The fighter brothers of mythology longed to right the wrong done to their mother, Sita, by their father, Ram. Modi and Shah are on a mission to establish their BJP as the next national alternative, after crushing the earlier one, Congress, and squelching its single binding factor, the Gandhi dynasty. During the earlier NDA rule, BJP’s efforts to do it was half-hearted, at best, and the end of A.B.Vajpayee’s government in 2004 put the Congress and the dynasty again at the top for a whole decade. Before taking charge of the BJP’s 2014 combat, Modi had put Shah in charge of the party in UP, as the two could not fight separately indeed. They must draw their bow backwards at once and release the arrows together.

After the phenomenal victory in 2014, in which the Congress was humbled to only 44 seats in the Lok Sabha, Luv and Kush had to catch a breath as they faced reversal in the 2015 assembly election in Bihar. It’s not that Modi and Shah had run out of their magic. Modi’s oratory was grand as ever and Shah picked up candidates and party workers from caste groups with the alacrity of the pelican snatching a fish from the lake’s surface. But nothing worked as the opposition had buried their historic internal feuds to form a Chinese wall against BJP.

This time round, the Modi-Shah team was meticulous and lucky. They left nothing to chances and learnt from the humiliating defeat in Bihar. In Bihar, the BJP worked hard to woo the Yadavs thinking that they will be angry with Nitish Kumar being projected as Chief Ministerial candidate. In the process, it ignored the other OBCs in Bihar and the Congress-RJD-JD(U) alliance proved fatal. The Luv-Kush duo knew the consequences of BJP losing UP and left nothing to chances. The strategy was in place from April last year when an insignificant OBC leader Keshav Prasad Maurya was appointed as UP BJP Chief. Three months later in July several OBC first timers MPs from UP were inducted in the Modi Council of Ministers. The luck favoured Luv-Kush duo again when some behind the scenes efforts to form a Bihar-type Mahagathbandhan (umbrella alliance of anti-BJP parties) in Uttar Pradesh failed. Then came the generational conflict raging between Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son Akhilesh Yadav, Chief Minister. This left the carefully crafted alignment between OBC groups and Muslims all but defunct. Besides, Mayawati, supremo of BSP, the party of Dalits, carried such long and bitter record of enmity with Mulayam Yadav that a BSP-SP coalition was out of the question. 

This left Mayawati with her 11% Jatavs and truncated Muslims. Shah began to work on the non-Jatavs in a big way. Despite an alliance between Congress and SP in the state, hammered out between Akhilesh and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, the portly BJP chief tapped its backward constituents for lines of fissure. The Modi-Shah duo re-established the OBC link that BJP had lost with the political eclipse of former chief minister Kalyan Singh (he is now Rajasthan Governor). Shah ensured that Kalyan Singh’s grandson gets the Assembly ticket and any OBC leader worth a salt given primacy.

Shah’s long hunt for non-Yadav OBC and non-Jatav yielded a handpicked army that could bypass the caste silos that Congress, SP or BSP could occupy. Though community-wise voting behaviour reports are not available yet, there is little doubt that BJP could make deep inroads into non-Jatav Dalits and non-Yadav OBC groups. There was little hope, though, that Muslims would press the EVM button in favour of BJP. But Modi succeeded in created a ray of hope amongst the Muslim women by telling them that he would end the regressive Triple Talaq. Secondly, Modi’s campaign speeches remained refreshingly ‘development-oriented’ in the early phases of the seven-phase poll. But as polling moved eastward, Modi invoked his trademark divisive rhetoric while leaders like Yogi Adityanath did the rest to consolidate non-Muslim votes.

For Shah, revenge tasted best when served cold. His swagger, though muted, hit the jackpot as he said that in the first two stages of the poll, in which 125 seats were at stake, his party had won 115, against his own claim of 90 and rout predicted by the Opposition & the media. The BJP’s social engineering paid rich dividends in UP where BSP is routed, RLD wiped out and Congress decimated. The situation is so pitiable that Mayawati will be out of even Rajya Sabha in April 2018 when her term ends.

Though Congress has retained Punjab, a Sikh (non-Hindu) majority state. But the entire BJP leadership was praying for its win as it never wanted AAP to win the border state. The AAP’s rout in Goa has also gladdened the Duo’s hearts. In Manipur, inhabited by tribal people, it is facing extinction from the mainline states where Hindu identity can be political currency. Modi and Shah, the ‘Luv-Kush’ duo of BJP seems unstoppable in the 2019 general election.

Nemesis rides a Bicycle

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

It is the last week-end before the fate of the Maha Gathbandhan or Grand Alliance of the non-BJP parties in Uttar Pradesh is decided. While the SP and Congress have finally agreed to a seat-sharing arrangement, others have yet to chip in. In the state with 403-strong assembly, the young SP supremo and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav inarguably holds an image hugely surpassing that of Congress’ Rahul Gandhi. While SP won 224 seats in the 2012 election, the Congress got only 28, or a little over a tenth of the former. However, while SP bagged 29.13 per cent of votes, Congress tally was 11.65 per cent, which is not so abysmally low in relation to the winner. While the ‘grand old party’ had very few strong candidates in any region, including Awadh, its historical forte, it had, and possibly still has, flocks who’d still swear by the centenarian party.

And that perhaps explains why the 2017 alliance between SP and Congress is crucial for both SP and Congress. Akhilesh has just maneuvered his way out of the grip of old-timers led by his father Mulayam Singh Yadav, SP’s founder, and his crafty brother Shivpal Singh. Despite being the young, affable and smart CM of UP much of Akhilesh’s inability to pull it out of its disappointing image of being a lawless land lies with his father and his associates. These old-timers had imposed their authority on the young leader. After a lot of public spat, and jousting with an army of “uncles”, Akhilesh has finally secured the liberty to shape his legislative party the way he wishes. But he is neither cut in the mould of the Yadav clan’s rebellious child, nor would it give him any electoral percentage if he does so. SP under Akhilesh has to be a ‘compromise’ with SP of his father, who still enjoys some following. It’s a necessity that has driven Akhilesh to offer a ticket even to Shivpal and Azam Khan.

That is quite a tight-rope walk and is risky as Akhilesh alone cannot bring about an image makeover of the SP, which is identified with patriarchy, misogyny and gangster-worship. An alliance with Rahul, the young leader of an old national party, is expected to go a long way in wrapping up the Akhilesh-led combination in an aura of youthfulness. Besides, the Congress party’s traditional link with the state’s large Brahmin community (12 per cent) is a bonus.

The alliance looked wobbly until the last minute as Congress was playing pricy by demanding more than it deserved based on the 2014 Lok Sabha polls. The Congress won just two seats, those of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi while the SP managed to win 5 against the ‘Modi storm’ and the decline in its vote share was much less than Congress’ cliff diving.  To nurture its pocket-boroughs, the VIP Lok Sabha constituencies of Amethi (Rahul Gandhi) and Rae Bareli (Sonia Gandhi), Congress demanded maximum assembly seats in that area.  

In the tough bargaining between Akhilesh and the Gandhi clan, the latter’s leverage is the Brahmin support it has always attracted. In Uttar Pradesh, Brahmins are more than a caste. They’re opinion makers as they interface with the public—be it in the local media, educational institutions or the bar associations or religious institutions. It is from these platforms that the hawa, or the popular consensus, moves as to which side is ‘winning’. And this verdict motivates fence-sitters, who represent majority of voters in a state like Uttar Pradesh where ideology, unlike, say, in Kerala, counts for very little. In 2007, it’s the hawa fanned by the upper caste that had made fence-sitters believe it was Mayawati’s turn, and she made it to the top office. In the last Lok Sabha election, the upper caste voters including Brahmins voted overwhelmingly for Narendra Modi as they saw him as a symbol of both conservative Hindutva and a modern reformer. But, over the years, BJP in Uttar Pradesh is perceived as an outright communal party with OBC groups at its core. Keshav Prasad Maurya, an OBC leader, now holds the post of BJP state president. BJP MP Yogi Adityanath, much criticised for his communal hate-mongering, has been chosen among the party’s main campaigners. Besides, the memories of riots at Moradabad and Saharanpur are still raw. It peeved the educated class that expected Modi to usher in a wave of modernisation, but got communal slugfest in its place.

From Akhilesh’s perspective, Congress’ demands of 125 seats were undoubtedly irksome. But the dividend he can expect from an SP-Congress unity, extending to JD(U), RLD and even Mamata Banerjee’s TMC being on board, goes a very long way. If the future alliance ultimately trounces BJP in India’s most populous state—and that too three years after BJP had grabbed 73 of its 80 Lok Sabha seats—it will get flagged as evidence of the 2014 victory of Modi being a purely temporary phenomenon, something like a flash flood. If the BJP-Akali Dal combine also flounders in Punjab, it will lead to considerable diminution of Modi’s stature as winner in 2019.

By emerging as the new face of his party to defeat the old cabal of men with backward ideas and orthodox mindset, Akhilesh has already positioned himself as an icon of young voters. If he can forge and lead a powerful alliance in the next two years, he can  become the unquestioned national alternative. That should make BJP see its nemesis coming on a bicycle (SP’s poll symbol). 

Rahul wants Bihar type alliance with Mamata

by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group

Makes an offer to TMC

Harish Gupta
New Delhi, Nov. 29:

Desirous to create Bihar-type Mahagathbandhan against the BJP in West Bengal, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi established a direct contact with TMC chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.While the first round of informal talks took place at the Patna Airport when Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee were waiting to board their respective flights to return to Delhi and Kolkata respectively in their special aircraft.

Highly placed sources say that Rahul Gandhi took the initiative to walk up to Mamata Banerjee and the one-to-one meeting continued for more than 20 minutes.What transpired between the two was immediately known then. Since both of them had gone to Patna to attend Nitish Kumar's swearing-in-ceremony and had bumped into each other at the podium as well, not much significance was attached to it then.It has not surfaced that Rahul Gandhi made an upfront offer to Mamata Banerjee that Congress is willing to settle for anywhere between 55-65 Assembly seats in West Bengal going to polls in May 2016. 

The Congress has 40 MLAs in a House of 294 and had secured second position in 25-odd constituencies in 2011 Assembly polls. Rahul Gandhi is so keen to create Mahagathbandhan against the BJP that he is even willing to concede more seats to the TMC. Mamata Banerjee was taken by complete surprise when Rahul Gandhi made this upfront offer. She is reported to have told Gandhi that she would revert to him on the issue after discussing it within the party forum. 

Since Mamata Banerjee is expected to visit Delhi on December 7 to attend the marriage of Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's daughter, she may meet Congress president Sonia Gandhi as well. Though the purpose of her visit is to seek central funds for various projects, she cannot have any truck with the BJP in West Bengal. 

The Modi government requires the support of her 33 MPs in Lok Sabha and 11 in the Rajya Sabha. Though Rahul Gandhi has a good personal rapport with CPM leader Sitaram Yechury, the Congress has not enter into any electoral understanding with the CPM. The two are contesting against each other in Kerala in May 2016 Assembly polls. Therefore, there can be no electoral understanding in West Bengal.  Rahul Gandhi's unilateral offer to Mamata Banerjee is a tactical move so that she doesn't go with the BJP in Parliament or outside. The Congress' vote bank is dwindling by the day and an electoral understanding may help in containing the slide.