On June 23, opposition parties will debut their biggest effort yet to organise an anti-BJP alliance for the 2024 national election. A meeting in Patna, where the seeds of the anti-Indira Gandhi movement were sown during a rally addressed by Jayaprakash Narayan on June 4, 1974, was suggested by Mamata Banerjee when Nitish Kumar and his deputy Tejashwi Yadav met with her in Kolkata on April 24.
The 1974 movement gave a boost to anti-Congressism; the bid now is for anti-BJPism. Then the target was Indira Gandhi. Now it is Narendra Modi.
Forming alliances to defeat the party in power has been a recurring phenomenon since the late 1960s. It began with the emergence of Indira Gandhi in 1966. She overcame the challenge in 1967 and in 1971. Opposition unity succeeded in 1977 and in 1989 - on both occasions, the BJP and its precursor, Jana Sangh, were the fulcrum of the successful alliance effort and the Congress was vanquished.
This time around, Congress will be the fulcrum, or at least it aims to be. It remains to be seen if this status is conceded to the Grand Old Party by the Patna participants. Many of these parties are direct rivals of the Congress on their limited turfs.
The Congress (O), Swatantra Party, Jana Sangh and the Socialists, who made up the Grand Alliance of 1971 and came together under a common Janata symbol in 1977, had ideological differences, but there was no turf war between them. They all were pan-state parties, not restricted to regions.
In 1989, Bofors provided fertile ground for another anti-Congress consolidation and some splinter parties gave up their individual identities to form the Janata Dal under VP Singh. VP Singh received the post-poll support of the BJP and the Left. In the run-up to that election, the primacy of VP Singh as the face against Rajiv Gandhi was acknowledged by the entire Opposition. The common refrain today is that a face against Modi will emerge post-poll; the efficacy of a Prime Ministerial face in a campaign was underscored in 1989, and effectively projected in 2014 and 2019.
Past alliances were formed by parties which had state footprints. Successful campaigns were run when parties merged their identities and contested under a common symbol. In 2023, apart from Congress, only Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) can claim pan-India status after winning Punjab besides Delhi. All other participants of the June 23 conclave have an influence restricted to their states. The possibility of a common identity has not even figured in the confabulations.
Not much ought to be expected from the Patna gathering. It is at best an exploratory move, an expression of intent.
In 2016, when Mamata Banerjee returned to power in Kolkata for the second time, Telengana's K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) was at the forefront of the idea of a Federal Front. In 2018, when HD Kumaraswamy was sworn in as Karnataka Chief Minister, another photo op of joint hand-raising by anti-BJP leaders emerged.
On June 24, a similar photograph may be front-paged by newspapers, but both KCR and Kumaraswamy, the centrepieces of the 2016 and 2018 photo-ops, will be missing. Kumaraswamy's party is slowly veering towards the BJP. KCR's party, renamed BRS (Bharat Rashtra Samithi), aims to expand its footprint beyond Telangana - perhaps what is keeping it away from Patna. KCR had visited Patna and pow-wowed with Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav in August last year. But he will skip the June 23 meet.
The BJD's Naveen Patnaik has stoically maintained his distance from the unity moves. He is warm to anyone who calls on him in Bhubaneswar. When Nitish Kumar went to meet him in early May, Patnaik took only his Bihar counterpart into the meeting room, making the chief of Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United), Lallan Singh, and Bihar minister Sanjay Jha wait outside. Patnaik will not be in Patna on June 23. Neither will YS Jagan Mohan Reddy.
So, three Coromandel states which have non-BJP regimes will be missing.
Another major regional force absent from Patna will be Mayawati's BSP, which won no seats but garnered 13% votes in UP in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. The BSP has pockets of influence in other states as well.
After its 2014 and 2019 drubbing, the Congress had been on a downslide. Things have somewhat changed after Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra and the victory in Karnataka. It has rekindled hope in the party. Rahul Gandhi, though not an office bearer of his party, has emerged as the most prominent opposition face, with his approval rating at 27%. Though he is far behind Narendra Modi's 43, the Congress leader is way ahead of Mamata Banerjee's four, Arvind Keriwal's four and Nitish Kumar's one per cent rating. The phantom of the Patna move, Lalu Yadav, is understood to have telephoned Rahul Gandhi to ensure that he attends the conclave.
During his recent US sojourn, Rahul Gandhi was hailed by his supporters as "future PM". On the eve of the Patna conclave, this sentiment has been voiced by the Bihar Congress unit, though as things stand, Rahul Gandhi is barred from contesting in 2024, unless a court backs him in his appeal against his conviction and subsequent disqualification from Lok Sabha.
The Congress upswing has caused worries for the parties that have grown at the expense of the party. The shift of Muslim votes to the Congress from Kumaraswamy's Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka and from the Trinamool Congress at the Sagardihi bye-poll in West Bengal has sent out a message. Post-Karnataka, there is no scoffing at Congress prospects in neighbouring Telangana anymore. A confident Congress will be joining the meeting in Patna.
No agenda has been set for June 23. There is talk that Sharad Pawar may emerge as the patriarch of the unity conclave. A common minimum programme (CMP) is proposed. Nitish Kumar as host, and Pawar as the prime mover may try to set up a joint front for 2024. A common agenda may not find favour with some. Congress, Left parties and Trinamool are said to prefer a seat-sharing chat rather than a discussion that they feel is best had post-election, as was the case in 2004.
Some participants are not inclined to accept the pivotal role of the Congress in the exercise and are bent upon throwing a spanner in the works. Arvind Kejriwal has thrown his muffler into the ring. He has, on his own, set a condition for the agenda of the conclave. He wants a discussion on the Centre's Ordinance on the control of services in Delhi to precede all agenda of unity. He told the media on June 20 "I hope all parties in that meeting to ask the Congress to clarify its stand. I think the first agenda of that meeting will be the Centre's ordinance that ends democracy in Delhi. I will carry a copy of the Constitution with me. I will explain to all parties that they should not think that Delhi is a Union Territory, so this has been brought just for it..." Thus Kejriwal's "tuition" on the Constitution is a condition set by AAP for June 23. Conditions are not conducive to unity talks.
Kejriwal has been warmly received by most participants of the Patna meet to discuss his plea for unity on the floor of parliament during the Monsoon Session to vote out the ordinance. Congress, which has the most numbers in the opposition benches of both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, has not responded to AAP's overtures. Kejriwal's request for a meeting with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has been pending since May 26. Kejriwal apparently now prefers to pressure Congress for its support.
Congress units in Delhi and Punjab have vociferously opposed any truck with AAP. The June 20 statement is not Kejriwal's sole message for Congress in the run-up to Patna. On June 18, he flagged off AAP's campaign for the year-end Rajasthan election with a rally at Sriganganagar. AAP has minimal presence in the state. When black flags were shown to Kejriwal by Congress workers, he blamed Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot for this "neech harqat" (petty behaviour). There has been a buzz that if the Gehlot-Sachin Pilot differences are not ironed out, joining AAP could be an option for the young rebel. Kejriwal's Rajasthan campaign and the one he is planning in Madhya Pradesh are not deemed as friendly gestures towards the Congress.
Delhi minister and AAP leader Saurabh Bharadwaj recently said if the Congress backed out of the contests in Delhi and Punjab in the Lok Sabha polls, then AAP may consider staying out of the Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh contests. In response, Congress leaders point out that in Karnataka, where AAP contested, its candidates forfeited their deposits (lost badly); AAP polled 0.58 % of the total votes, even below the percentage of voters opting for NOTA (None Of The Above) - 0.69. Congress, therefore, does not seem perturbed. Kejriwal shall carry his "condition politics" along with him to Patna.
Apart from AAP's glitches, Patna will have to paper over the egos of Mamata Banerjee and Akhilesh Yadav. They seek pivotal roles in their states, Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. The CPI (M)-Congress contest in Kerala, where the Congress won 15 and the CPI (M) one of 20 seats in 2019 will also be on the table.
The total number of parliament seats held by the Patna conclave participants is 230: 142 in Lok Sabha and 88 in Rajya Sabha. Congress has the largest pie of 85 MPs. These parties account for a total of 1,500 MLAs across the country. The Congress share is 906. If there is give and take in the unity effort, demands for the Congress to "give" perhaps may be more than its propensity to take.
The Nitish Kumar plan, honed by Sharad Pawar, aims at one-on-one fights with the BJP in 400-450 seats with an aim to restrict the BJP to 225 Lok Sabha seats (excluding the possible wins of its present and proposed NDA allies).
The BJP ousted Congress in 175 of the 190 seats in which these parties were in a direct contest in 2019. In the 170 seats the Congress contested directly with regional parties in 2019, it won 37. Whether the Congress can cross the mark of less than 10 per cent of Lok Sabha seats, which was how it performed in 2014 and 2019, will be the determining factor. For any anti-BJP alliance to succeed, a Congress with around 140 seats is axiomatic.
(Shubhabrata Bhattacharya is a retired Editor and a public affairs commentator.)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.