Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is the latest in a series of regional leaders who have advocated pan-India opposition unity to defeat the Modi-led BJP in next year’s General Election. He has underlined the need for inclusion of the Congress party to make this effective. It is a good idea but mostly for him. After his party, the JD(U)’s tie-up with the Lalu Yadav led RJD, getting the Congress on board would mean these parties would allocate seats for each to contest. Maybe, being a national party, the Congress would get a respectable number in its kitty, but the JD(U) and the RJD would retain a larger share. However, if earlier such alliances are anything to go by, particularly the experience in UP, the votebank of the caste-based parties will not transfer to the Congress. It is unlikely it will win more seats than if it contests on its own. It will, however, have lost even its small votebank in the seats it surrenders to its allies.
The JD(U), on the other hand, will greatly benefit because it will have ensured there is no depletion in the anti-BJP votes on the seats it contests. This is because in case the parties, particularly the Congress, contest every seat, the JD(U) may be left with almost nothing – such is its present state in Bihar. So, all the fancy talk is only a con Nitish Kumar is attempting as a last ditch effort to survive in Bihar politics.
Nitish Kumar is also positioning himself, most notably, as an opposition candidate for Prime Minister by repeatedly claiming he doesn’t want the post. This is because he knows that, should the results in Bihar be positive in any way, the first act of the RJD will be to depose him as Chief Minister. He is a crafty long time political survivor making a last bid to remain relevant.
It remains to be seen if the Congress falls for this ploy. The party may be losing seats in the majority of the states but it still remains the ‘national’ party in contention. By surrendering seats even before the elections, it will render itself increasingly irrelevant. So, keeping the long term perspective in view, it should consider whether a BJP victory would actually be preferable to a JD(U)-RJD one crafted from the non-Hindutva vote. Does the party have the smarts to take the right decision?
