Opposition parties must recognize their differences while coming together

Parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are often at loggerheads with one another, and any coordinated action among them is never easy. Contradictions are many, at the ideological and personal levels; and they represent conflicting interest groups in most cases. Some tend to be guarded in their approach to the BJP, and when they turn strident against it, it is most often to safeguard their home turfs. The meetings between Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and other party leaders such as the Congress’s Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, the CPI(M)’s Sitaram Yechury and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal, in New Delhi were exploratory rather than decisive. What is clear, however, is an increasing realization among non-BJP parties that mutual animosities might turn them into easy prey for the BJP, whose hunger for power is infinite. The fact that most of these non-BJP parties were born out of antagonism to the Congress — and the BJP’s national rival — makes finding common ground even more evasive. The BJP is the hegemon in the Hindi heartland, while it faces resistance from regional parties in several States. An alliance between the regional parties does not lead to any transfer of votes as they exist in different regions. Some of these parties are rivals at the State level, as in the case of the Left and the Congress in Kerala. Therefore, pre-poll alliances are of limited consequence, generally speaking.

But there are certain States where parties could come together to aggregate anti-BJP votes, most importantly in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where several parties are in the fray. A lot will depend on how well the Congress manages to galvanize support in States where it is the BJP’s primary opponent, as in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka. Social justice parties such as the Janata Dal (U) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar, and the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh can coordinate their actions with the Congress. Mr. Nitish Kumar’s role is important from this point of view, but social justice politics itself is facing a crisis of legitimacy in the face of Hindutva. Alliances are important, but a shared programme and vision, amplified by sustained outreach to the public, are more important. The significant differences of opinion among key Opposition leaders over the Adani controversy, and V.D. Savarkar are cases in point. Any Opposition front will have to concede the wide variety of opinions and interests that exist among its key actors. The challenge for them is to discover common ground where they can converge. A puritan idealistic pursuit is an untimely luxury at the moment; in any case, that will not be a match to the ideological cohesiveness of the BJP.
(The Hindu)