2019 general elections: Why Rahul Gandhi and Mamata Banerjee are fit for each other
As she barnstormed through Delhi last week, Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee met every Opposition leader except one: Congress president Rahul Gandhi. Between them, the Congress and TMC have 82 Lok Sabha MPs. They form the two largest Opposition groups in the lower house (excluding the AIADMK's 37 seats). In the event of the BJP-led NDA falling short of 272 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election, Mamata and Rahul will hold the levers of power. No other Opposition party except the DMK is likely to get more than 20 Lok Sabha seats in 2019.
Minority votes
Mamata and Rahul would normally be a good fit. Each has a strong minority vote bank. Each despises the BJP. And each is family-led (Mamata's nephew Abhishek Banerjee is her de facto heir). But there are dissonances as well. The TMC is a single-state party. The Congress, in contrast, is trying to expand its shrunken national footprint with a strong performance in Assembly elections in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh later this year. It expects to win Karnataka next month and at least double its Lok Sabha tally in 2019 to 90-100 seats.
Mamata can at best hope to repeat her landslide of 34 seats out of West Bengal's 42 seats. She thus has two options for 2019. Option A is to form a non-NDA, non-UPA Third Front by breaking NDA allies like the Shiv Sena, tying up with Chandrababu Naidu's TDP and K Chandrasekhar Rao's TRS in the south, Naveen Patnaik's BJD in Odisha and the Akhilesh-Mayawati SP-BSP combination in Uttar Pradesh. She said last week in Delhi: "Mayawatiji and Akhileshji are strong leaders in UP and if they come together no one else can do anything. All of us are of the view that we should work together. This government has been discredited. Whether one agrees with it or not, the message about demonetisation, GST and bank fraud has gone down (negatively) to the people."
Mamata's math of course doesn't add up. All the regional parties together, even if they sweep their respective states, will be hard pressed to cross 160 Lok Sabha seats. To form a viable government this motely crew will need Congress-led UPA support. The atrophied UPA has only two parties which can hope to win a significant number of seats - the DMK in Tamil Nadu and NCP in Maharashtra. Mamata has been wooing both. But even with the DMK and NCP, a Mamata-led Third Front will still have less than 200 seats. In the end she will have to opt for Option B: Rahul Gandhi.
Without the Congress' estimated 90-odd seats, a viable Third Front is a chimera. Rahul himself has two options. One, to support a Third Front from outside as the Congress opportunistically did in 1996-98. Two, to join such a government and claim the prime ministership as head of the alliance's single-largest party. Both choices are fraught with obstacles.
Third Front
A quarrelsome Third Front led by Mamata will disintegrate even more quickly than HD Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujaral's United Front governments when the Congress pulled the plug on them. Mamata is acutely aware of this history.
Besides, in a putative Third Front there are almost as many claimants for the prime ministership as there are alliance partners. A menagerie of Mamata, Pawar, KCR, Mayawati and Akhilesh, with or without Rahul, will enthuse the BJP. It knows what usually follows such a coalition: a snap mid-term election. It happened to the Morarji Desai-led Janata Party in 1979 allowing Indira Gandhi to return to power in January 1980 with a clear majority. And of course it happened in 1998, vaulting the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA to six years in office.
Rahul knows that if he is part of a grand alliance of regional satraps with large egos and few seats, he will open the floodgates for a rejuvenated NDA-4 in 2020. Mamata has an even bigger problem.Can she transform herself from the leader of a regional party whose cadre has a legacy of violence into a national leader with a cogent vision? What is her policy position on Pakistan? On China? On Kashmir? On economic reforms? On global trade? On India's cold-start doctrine? If Mamata or Rahul aspire to hold high public office, they must spell out their specific policy agendas.
Finding Hinduism
A Mamata-led Third Front carries other significant risks. Her pro-Muslim policies in West Bengal could polarise Hindu voters behind the BJP in 2019. Rahul recognises this danger, hence his recent discovery of Hinduism.Sonia knows the danger too: as she lamented at the India Today Conclave, the Congress is regarded as a "Muslim party". A Mamata-led Third Front with minority-leaning leaders like Akhilesh Yadav, Sharad Pawar and KCR could even frighten away moderate Hindus disenchanted with the BJP's four years in office. They may leap back into the BJP's electoral embrace. A Rahul-led front could fare no better: it carries the Congress' baggage of scams, dynasty and nepotism.
The NDA government's mixed record of achievements and missteps over the past four years has given the Opposition an opening for 2019. However, unless Mamata and Rahul learn to work together, that opening could quickly shut. When Mamata was asked why she didn't meet the Congress president in Delhi last week, she replied coldly: "I am in touch with him on text messages, sometimes."
(Courtesy of Mail Today)