Regional parties face battle for relevance in election arena
In many ways, it is clear that the 2024 elections are framed by a challenge repeatedly thrown out by Prime Minister Modi over the past few weeks.
October 2022 was a different time for India’s traditionally powerful regional satraps, one of cautious, relative optimism. In Bihar, the Janata Dal (United) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) ran a government together, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) were part of an opposition alliance that could have proved troublesome for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and so emboldened was Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao (popularly known as KCR) that he changed the name of his party from Telangana Rashtra Samithi to Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and held a series of meetings with other powerful regional leaders, from Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra to Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, hoping to forge an alliance of his own.
Cut to March 2024, Nitish Kumar has returned to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) fold, severing ties with the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) bloc after failing to build an opposition consensus, Sharad Pawar has found his Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) dismembered, and a diminished KCR has lost both his government in Telangana, and any hope of a country-wide upsurge. If anything, as India approaches pivotal national elections, dates for which were announced by the Election Commission of India on Saturday, regional parties across the country face a battle for relevance, either subsumed by the broader NDA umbrella under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that continues to be powerful or as part of an INDIA grouping struggling to find common ground. And there are those ploughing a lonely furrow, the last vanguard against a resurgent BJP.
In many ways, it is clear that the 2024 elections are framed by a challenge repeatedly thrown out by Prime Minister Modi over the past few weeks. Not only has he said that the BJP is well on its way to singular majority on its own for the third consecutive time, but has exhorted voters to reward the BJP with above 370 seats, and the NDA with above 400 in the 543-member Lok Sabha. “Abki baar, 400 paar,” he has said in public meeting recently.
To that end, the NDA umbrella has grown significantly in the last six months, leveraging regional insecurity and ambition with surgical precision, even as the Congress has decried the use of central agencies as instruments of coercion. If the RJD-Congress-JD(U) “Mahagathbandhan” in Bihar had formed a considerable social coalition, it would threaten 39 of 40 seats that the NDA won in 2019, but Nitish Kumar has now returned to the fold. In Karnataka, HD Deve Gowda’s Janata Dal (Secular) or JD(S) is now fighting alongside the BJP, and in Andhra Pradesh, the NDA has new powerful allies in the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Jana Sena. In Odisha, 15 years after Biju Janata Dal (BJD) chief Naveen Patnaik walked out of the NDA labelling the BJP “communal”, both parties continue to be in talks for a once unthinkable alliance.
One JD(U) leader said the realignment was a matter of “existential strategy”. “It is clear that the BJP and Prime Minister Modi are still the dominant force in Indian politics. In state elections, there is still a battle. But in the Lok Sabha, he remains extremely popular, in the absence of a credible challenge. So the choice is clear. Either ally with the BJP, and win a few seats in conjunction with them, or get reduced to nothing. This way, the ties between the state and the Union government continue to be robust, particularly when state governments depend on the Centre for so much. The BJP is clear. You can either be with them, or run the risk of being against them,” the leader said.
No state demonstrates this balkanisation more than Maharashtra, the province that has India’s second largest number of seats in the Lok Sabha at 48. In the run-up to 2024, both the Shiv Sena and the NCP have found themselves fighting internal battles. The Uddhav Thackeray-led government fell in 2022 after a coup by loyalist Eknath Shinde, who cleaved the party in two and became chief minister in alliance with the BJP. A year later, the state’s other powerful regional satrap, Sharad Pawar’s NCP, fell apart too, when the patriarch’s ambitious nephew, Ajit Pawar, broke ranks, joined the NDA and became deputy chief minister. There has been a battle for election symbols, even names, but the battle for cadre loyalty may well define 2024.
Meanwhile, the INDIA bloc has floundered after a promising start. “It is a question of political clarity. The INDIA bloc held a series of meetings in 2023, but they have amounted to very little results. There is a complete lack of consensus on leadership, on message, even on seats. In states where they are part of an alliance, except in Uttar Pradesh, they have still not been able to come to a seat-sharing agreement with resources focused on an ill-timed Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra,” a Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader said.
With an ostensibly weak Congress in the Hindi heartland where it has direct battles with the BJP in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, it is regional parties that form the bulwark of resistance against the NDA’s “400 paar”. In states such as Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, MK Stalin and Mamata Banerjee are both battling a BJP attempting to break new ground, and have framed their campaigns around regional pride being the vanguard against a hegemonic Centre. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has accused the BJP of pushing a “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan” narrative and hurting the interests of south India, while in Bengal, where the BJP won 18 of the 42 seats in 2019, the TMC has refurbished its “outsider” jab at the opposition party, by calling them “modern day zamindars.”
Political experts, however, said that while the BJP’s rising footprint was a cause of immediate concern for regional parties, Indian political history shows that there is little place for permanent epitaphs. “The BJP’s strength is certainly a broad cause for worry for regional parties, but there is still place for them. Every region and state has local and community aspirations. Even when the Congress was the biggest party till the seventies, factions broke away to form regional powers. As the BJP continues to grow, there is a chance fissures will emerge,” said Rabi Das, an Odisha-based political commentator.
But as recent experience of some regional parties shows, in the new India, the fissures are within them.
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