The BJP’s election machine’s famed appetite to wrest State after State from Opposition parties has set in motion a process that the party may not have anticipated: Opposition unity from one State to another.
This is the prime takeaway of the Kairana verdict: a divided Opposition is as important for a party as electoral surges.
Inadvertent catalyst
As the BJP steps into the next Lok Sabha polls less than a year from now, it has been an inadvertent catalyst to never-expected alliances.
The Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which have been sworn rivals since the 1995 Lucknow guest house attack on Mayawati, collaborated to beat the BJP in Uttar Pradesh’s recent Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha bypolls.
And the Rashrtriya Lok Dal (RLD) and the Congress added their collective might to the coming together of Opposition forces in Kairana, with the result that RLD candidate Tabassum Begum trounced late BJP leader Hukum Singh’s daughter Mriganka Singh.
This comes close on the heels of the Janata Dal (Secular) and the Congress stitching together a post-poll alliance in Karnataka to keep the BJP out. The BJP, eight short of the majority, staked claim despite the Opposition post-poll alliance but backed out before the trust vote.
Closing ranks to survive was the strategy used by the Opposition parties in the 1960s and 70s to stem the Congress’s tide. The strategy acquired a specific name: anti-Congressism.
Strategy of 1960s
In other words, the 1960s and 70s saw ideologically disparate political players like the socialists and the Jana Sangh come together to defeat the Congress — first, in the States in 1967, with Sanyukta Vidhayak Dal governments being formed, and then at the national level in 1977, when several parties merged to form the Janata Party.
Much on the same lines, the beginning of a new ‘anti-BJP-ism’ is palpable.
“It was a herculean task for Rahul Gandhi to bring Opposition parties together to damage the BJP in 2019. But it is the BJP’s obssesion with Congress-free and even Opposition-free India that seems to be accomplishing the task by creating an existential crisis for Opposition parties,” says political analyst Sajjan Kumar, co-author of the book Everyday Communalism .
“The sign of a sharp political strategy is not just to focus on winning elections but also to keep the Opposition divided. Here, the BJP’s attempts to maximise political gains in each election are doing exactly the opposite and may hurt the party’s tally in 2019,” he said.
The alliance in U.P. has been in the making for a few months now, with the BSP backing the SP in the Phulpur and Gorakhpur bypolls and the SP agreeing to transfer its surplus votes to the BSP for the 10th Rajya Sabha seat in U.P. months back. The BJP, which had decided to make a bid to win the 10th seat despite not having the requisite numbers, however, succeeded in defeating the BSP.
“While the BJP’s dream run in U.P. in the last Assembly polls had made the BSP and SP wary, the insistence not to allow the BSP a single Rajya Sabha seat from the State may have cemented this alliance further,” says Mr. Kumar.
If the run-up to 2014 saw the BJP add some allies, like the Lok Jan Shakti Party and the Telugu Desam Party, to the National Democratic Alliance ranks, the run-up to 2019 may well witness an opposite trend: signs of Opposition consolidation to keep the BJP out in key States.
