The Janata Dal is likely to be resurrected on Thursday with one of the proposed names — Samajwadi Janata Dal — when members of the Janata Parivar parties gather at 1 p.m. at Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh’s residence here to work out the details of the proposed merger.
As Mulayam Singh is the senior-most leader in the group and his party has the largest number of seats in it — five in the Lok Sabha and 15 in the Rajya Sabha — he is likely to emerge as the leader, sources in the Janata Parivar said.
The Janata Dal-United, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Samajwadi Party, the Indian National Lok Dal, the Janata Dal-S and the Samajwadi Janata Party will attend the meeting. Those likely to attend are SP’s Ramgopal Yadav, JD-U’s Nitish Kumar, Sharad Yadav and K.C. Tyagi, RJD’s Lalu Prasad, INLD’s Dushyant Chautala, JD-S’s H.D. Deve Gowda and SJP’s Kamal Morarka.
National party statusIf the merger goes through, the new party will have 15 Lok Sabha MPs, and 7.06 per cent of the national vote, making the outfit eligible for national party status. A senior JD-U leader told The Hindu that the new party will apply to the Election Commission to be recognised as a national party.
According to the present rules, any political party that “wins at least two per cent seats in the House of the People (i.e., 11 seats in the existing House having 543 members), and these members are elected from at least three different States,” then the party is eligible.
The Janata Parivar’s group of 15 draws its MPs from four States, Bihar (RJD-4 plus JD-U-2), Uttar Pradesh (SP-5), Haryana (INLD-2) and Karnataka (JD-S-2). Of course, it remains to be seen whether the EC accepts a post-poll arrangement.
The move comes 26 years after the V.P. Singh-led Janata Dal was formed on October 11, 1988, out of a range of socialist splinter outfits.
