How Mamata Banerjee plans to use TMC's rally to showcase Opposition unity
Electoral success in India has often boiled down to public perception and the prevailing narrative. In 2014, both favoured the BJP and the results were there for everyone to see. We are en route to the next general election in 2019. While the government has succeeded in certain areas, it has not performed according to expectations in others.
This is normal, but the opposition always has the advantage of a relatively favourable public perception because it does not have to take hard decisions that invariably set up sky-high expectations, which are frankly difficult to meet.
The TMC has already said that its January 19 rally would be the biggest in post-independence India. AICC president, Rahul Gandhi, fresh from his resounding electoral success in the Hindi heartland, had written to West Bengal CM Mamata di, pledging his support. Mallikarjun Kharge represented the party at the rally.
Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, who has just stitched up a potentially game-changing alliance in UP with the BSP was there, along with former PM Deve Gowda, Karnataka CM HD Kumaraswamy and Arvind Kejriwal. Farooq Abdullah, along with son Omar Abdullah, Tejaswi Yadav, Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu, DMK supremo Stalin, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Arun Shourie, Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha – all members of the Vajpayee cabinet – were also present.
This reads like a who's who of non-Congress, non-BJP parties that are in the opposition today. They have a combined strength of 119 in the present Lok Sabha. These parties dominate some eight states – mainly West Bengal, Karnataka, UP, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
Combined, these states send more than half the total strength of the Lower House – some 308 MPs. In the present House, the BJP has a large chunk of representatives from these states, thanks mostly to its stellar show in Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 general elections.
By simple arithmetic, it should have been easy for the BJP to maintain its dominance. But things have been moving fast in the last year or so. Equations have changed rapidly. The TDP has walked out of the NDA and Tamil Nadu is on the verge of a DMK sweep in 2019.
The recent assembly elections ensured that the Congress got to keep its seat at the table of power. Of course, it was also helped by a decade and a half of anti-incumbency. It remains to be seen if Vidhan Sabha votes translate seamlessly into Lok Sabha seats for the Congress.
Although the popularity of PM Modi has taken a hit, it still remains high. On the other hand though, failed social schemes, especially farm loan waivers and their failures, could come back to haunt Congress government in these three states. The same phenomena might affect the BJP too – in UP, for instance, its ambitious farm loan waiver has not taken off. And now, to add to the resentment on the ground, there is the potent Mayawati-Akhilesh combine looming as well.
Meanwhile, despite all the ruckus on Rafale, it is not going to turn into a 'Bofors 2.0'. The Congress seems to have realised this – but in the absence of any actionable input on corruption, it has few issues to approach the voter with. The non-Congress, non-BJP opposition have already made their intentions clear as to what they wish to do.
In the aftermath of Mamata's rally, the pertinent questions that need answering now would be – what would be the role of the Congress in the political near-future? Can the Congress afford to not put up candidates in these 308 seats? Intriguing questions. Then, there are non-BJP, non-Congress parties who are fence-sitters presently. But they won't be fence-sitters, come the 2019 polls. The prelude to a mouth-watering political drama has been written for 2019. We saw an appetiser in Kolkata yesterday.