Regional parties look for tie-ups to keep BJP at bay
As the Congress grapples unceasingly with in-house issues, India’s regional parties are moving around like busy bees, wasting little time in putting up a challenge of sorts to the BJP before the 2024 elections. The southern forces in particular seem to be at play because barring Karnataka and Puducherry, the BJP has not got a footprint in the other four states, although being the BJP, despite all odds, it never gives up without a fight. If the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and DMK president, MK Stalin registered his presence in Delhi in early April, last week, it was K Chandrashekar Rao’s turn to head northward. Like Stalin, a pit stop for the Telangana CM and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief was Arvind Kejriwal’s mohalla clinics and schools. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has governments in Delhi and Punjab, is an apparent challenger to the BJP after the Congress faded away in the north and parties like the Samajwadi Party and the Shiromani Akali Dal were routed in the February-March 2022 elections. Naturally, the southern leaders, ambitious to take their agenda and plans countrywide, have only the AAP to cling to, in realising their larger goal of unseating the BJP through a federal grouping.
However, Rao, infused with an over-enthusiasm bordering on impatience, was more effusive in praising the Delhi CM and AAP leader than Stalin. Stating that Telangana had borrowed the idea of a mohalla clinic from Kejriwal, he upheld the Delhi dispensation as an exemplar of the governance the country needed. The question is: are programmes vested with more profound long-term benefits such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act and food security of no significance to the TRS?
The answer lay in Rao’s inherent dislike for the Congress which in the recent past rebuffed a tentative attempt he made to warm up to it to fight the BJP. Rao made it clear that the Opposition’s endeavour to put up a joint candidate against the BJP/NDA in electing the next President this year had no place for the Congress. His southern peer Stalin will not be on board because he has a long-standing alliance with the Congress. At best, Rao can hope to arm-twist the Congress to endorse his proposal and accept the candidate the Opposition nominates, on the calculation that the Congress will not relish the idea of a splintered contest and lose badly. However, such calculations are up in the air and might not eventually materialise.
In recent times, when the non-BJP forces regrouped to form the United Front government in 1996 and the United Progressive Alliance in 2004, the Congress was an integral part of the experiments: the first time as a reluctant outside supporter and the second time as the spearhead in government. On both occasions, “secularism” was the glue that bound the disparate forces. The Left was intrinsic to both the coalitions. In a prospective assemblage of the Opposition, both the preconditions may not exist. The Trinamool Congress Party will be central to it and Mamata Banerjee is anathema to the CPM and its partners. “Secularism” has outlived its utility, now that nearly every party has either incorporated the BJP brand of political Hindutva in its manifesto in a more benign form or pays token obeisance to it.
Therefore, the Opposition has to scout for another raison d’etre to justify its existence. It’s apparent that the parties are fumbling. Cooperative federalism, once patented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is possibly one but when two important regional parties — the Biju Janata Dal and the YSR Congress Party ruling Odisha and Andhra Pradesh — are willing to negotiate with the BJP every time there’s a legislative crunch in Parliament in return for favours done to their states, the phrase sounds hollow. So what are the issues before the Opposition?
During his visit to Delhi and Chandigarh, Rao harked back to the year-long farmers’ protests on the Delhi border and made a political statement through words and optics. With Kejriwal and Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann in tow, he distributed cheques of Rs 3 lakh each to the families of those who died during the agitation. Stressing that power flowed from the farmers, Rao said, “If farmers want, they can change governments. It is not a big thing.” He called upon them to revive their protests and not back off until they got a constitutional guarantee for the right price for their crops.
Will Rao’s entreaty resonate again? For one, the agrarian protests hardly impacted the Uttar Pradesh election to the extent they were supposed to, not even in the western districts which were the epicentre. When it came to voting, the farmers were divided. A large section of the affected farmers, the well-off Jats who sounded upset with the BJP, in fact voted the party in the name of Hindutva.
For another, the BJP — which is looking to make inroads into Telangana after two electoral breakthroughs — marshalled its arguments barely moments after Rao spoke. Bandi Sanjay Kumar, the BJP’s feisty Telangana president, asked the CM where he was when “lakhs of farmers” in his state allegedly killed themselves after failing to sell their paddy stocks.
The crux of a regional coalition is this: be it the TMC, TRS, Shiv Sena, the DMK or the AAP, these forces have to protect their own turf from being poached upon by the BJP which is looking to make new conquests. The BJP may be considerably weakened in West Bengal, but it remains Mamata Banerjee’s principal adversary. So too in Maharashtra! Kejriwal, the south’s northern light, is up against problems in Punjab. He has to mind Delhi, so whether he has the time to sally forth into Himachal Pradesh is the big question. The limitations are obvious.
