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Forming a grand alliance in Uttar Pradesh won’t be easy
The Samajwadi Party has placed the onus of building an alliance in UP to counter the BJP on the Congress
The Samajwadi Party (SP) has placed on the Congress the onus of building an alliance to counter the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It has sought a share of seats in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan in return for making Congress a partner in Uttar Pradesh (UP). It has also, reports suggest, offered a rather limited set of seats to the Congress in UP itself — numbers range from half a dozen to eight to 12 out of 80 seats — and is not particularly enthused about the partnership. The SP’s priority remains sustaining and deepening its understanding with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
The public demands, and the difficult, mostly private, negotiations underway indicate the vast gulf that exists between the rhetoric of the Mahagathbandhan (grand alliance) and translating it into reality. In principle, all Opposition parties, particularly in UP, understand the need to come together. The BJP won 71 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats on its own, and 73 with its allies, in 2014. In the 2017 assembly election, the BJP scored a spectacular victory, winning three fourths of the seats. Even as the party succeeded in consolidating and expanding its social alliance, the Opposition’s vote fragmented. The SP and Congress fought together, but the absence of the BSP hurt deeply. And Muslims, Yadavs and Jatavs — the three main social groups who were sceptical of the BJP — voted separately. This experience and the fear of the BJP’s return to power has got all Opposition parties to, in principle, speak about the need for unity.
But there are practical difficulties. In UP, the SP believes that allying with the Congress hurt it in the last election — and that the party is so weak that it deserves not more than a few seats. The Congress believes that the SP is being too arrogant and, without the alliance, it would have fared even worse in the assembly polls. As for the other poll-bound states, the Congress also believes that these are fundamentally bipolar contests, and the SP is seeking more seats than it deserves. This comes in the wake of the recent decision of the BSP to fight with Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh. The big picture that emerges from this is two fold. Before the idea of Mahagathbandhan becomes a reality, there are real political and operational issues — particularly seat sharing and geographic spread — which need to be sorted out. And second, the negotiations and public haggling reinforce the perception that the Opposition parties do not have a well thought out, coherent plan but are just united by their urge to remove the BJP. This may not be the most effective way to building an alternative in 2019.
