Nitish Kumar’s Opposition Unity Formula Has A Little Problem—Practicality

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has stepped up his efforts to forge unity among Opposition parties to take on the BJP in next year’s Lok Sabha elections. 

Kumar has travelled to Lucknow Monday (April 24) to meet Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Kumar. From there, he is scheduled to fly to Kolkata to hold parleys with Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee. 

The Bihar chief minister plans to meet his Odisha counterpart Naveen Patnaik early next week, followed by meetings with Telangana chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao. 

Kumar is trying hard to broker a pact among all Opposition parties, including the Congress, to project a united bloc against the BJP next year. 

He is striving to sink, or at least temporarily paper over, irreconcilable differences between various regional parties and between the Congress and the regional parties. 

The Congress, Nitish Kumar concedes, will play a central role in the broad anti-BJP coalition that he is trying to cobble together. But important regional players like the Trinamool Congress will also have major roles to play. 

Nitish Kumar’s formula

Kumar has advocated that all opposition parties forge an electoral understanding to field a common candidate in as many Lok Sabha seats as possible. 

This is the primary and operative part of the formula that Nitish Kumar is advocating to take on the BJP. 

Under this formula, the strongest opposition candidate in each seat shall be identified and all parties will back him or her jointly and unequivocally. 

For instance, if a Samajwadi Party candidate in a particular seat in Uttar Pradesh is the strongest among all other opposition candidates and has the best chance of beating the BJP, other parties should withdraw from the contest and back him unreservedly. 

Nitish Kumar believes that such one-on-one contests in most, if not all, Lok Sabha seats will lead to the BJP’s defeat in most such seats. 

The formula also envisages that after a consensus is evolved on fielding a joint candidate in one seat, the other opposition parties also deploy their resources to ensure the victory of that candidate. 

For instance, once a decision is taken to field a Congress or a Left candidate from a particular Lok Sabha seat in Bengal, the Trinamool Congress has to support that Left or Congress candidate with its resources and also sincerely appeal to its supporters to vote for that Left or Congress candidate. 

Continuing with the example of Bengal, the Nitish Kumar formula will mean that in the Congress stronghold of Murshidabad, for instance, a Congress candidate will naturally be the strongest one among opposition parties. 

That will mean that the Congress gets to field its candidate from a seat in that stronghold and the Trinamool, which is an arch rival of the Congress in Bengal, will deploy its manpower and resources to ensure the success of the Congress candidate from that seat. 

In the other seats where Trinamool candidates are strong, the Congress and the Left--both viscerally opposed to the Trinamool in Bengal--will work to ensure the success of Trinamool candidates. 

Why the formula is inherently flawed:

• The unity among opposition parties that Nitish Kumar is trying to forge is extremely utopian and has never worked

• There is too much of bad blood between many opposition parties--the Trinamool and the Congress in Bengal and some other states, for instance--for such unity to be happen

• It will be impossible to evolve a consensus among opposition parties on fielding common candidate from even ten percent of Lok Sabha seats

• Even in the most unlikely event of all Opposition parties agreeing on backing one candidate from a seat, there are bound to be rebel candidates (the ones denied nomination) who will throw their hats in the ring and mar the prospects of the common Opposition candidate

• In most states, the Congress and regional parties are rivals and it will be impossible to get them to agree on a consensus candidate

• The Nitish Kumar formula assumes that voters will support a consensus candidate fielded by a coalition of opposition parties whose only agenda is to unseat the BJP from power

• The experiment that Nitish Kumar is advocating is a repeat of the Janata Party experiment of 1977 that left a bad taste in the electorate’s mouth. That experiment failed and India’s electorate harbour no inclination of bringing a shabby coalition of parties bound together precariously by an ‘anti-BJP’ glue to power

• India’s electorate is smart and knows very well that such an alliance, if it comes to power, will fail miserably in providing good, stable and strong governance

• Had anti-incumbency against the Modi government been very strong, such an opposition alliance would have stood a chance of winning. But that is not the case at all and Modi’s approval ratings continue to soar much above any other opposition neta

• The misgovernance, corruption and drift of the ten years (2004 to 2014) of the Congress-led UPA rule is still too fresh in people’s minds

• Nitish Kumar has not taken into account the strong BJP blitzkrieg against Opposition parties coming together on an anti-BJP plank. The BJP has already termed the prospective alliance or gathbandhan as thugbandhan (an alliance of thieves) and this attack will only sharpen in the coming months. There will be enough takers for the BJP’s pitch to foil Kumar’s utopian dream

• To the common man in India, the ‘democracy in danger’ cry being used to unite opposition parties cuts no ice and resonates only in certain echo chambers. The common man is interested only in roti, kapda and maakan, and the Modi government has delivered more than adequately on this front

• Nitish Kumar has assumed that Indians are angry with the Modi government. This assumption, like many of his other assumptions, is completely flawed

• Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee and all other opposition leaders, proclaim that they have no interest in the Prime Minister’s chair and their only objective is to unseat Narendra Modi from that chair. Few believe them, and polls show that a large majority of Indians feel that Modi ought to continue occupying that chair.

These are the primary reasons why Kumar’s premises are flawed and his formula will likely not work.

People of India realise fully well that a bunch of ambitious politicians joining hands to form an alliance with the sole objective of defeating the BJP can negate the gains made by India over the last decade.