THE MAKING OF A GRAND ALLIANCE
With the MOTN predicting 58 seats for the SP-BSP-RLD pre-poll alliance in UP in 2019, it seems to be advantage mahagathbandhan across the country
SCENE 1. LUCKNOW. On January 12, the sprawling campus of the Taj Mahal hotel in Lucknow’s Gomti Nagar looked both like a mega baraat party as well as a battle zone. With colourful posters and billboards all over Lucknow and the police cordoning off the area, the hotel was teeming with political party workers and journalists who had come to watch the formal announcement of the alliance between the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Rival political parties for 35 years, the Mayawati (BSP)-Akhilesh Yadav (SP) team, also known as the bua-bhatija gathbandhan (aunt-nephew alliance), could prove to be a game-changer.
As one senior BJP leader explained in Lucknow, “Two Hindi words, vikalp (alternative) and hawa (wind), denote the sharp change in popular mood in Uttar Pradesh after this new alliance. In March 2017, after the BJP swept the UP assembly election and Yogi Adityanath was sworn in as chief minister, the BJP was the only vikalp in the state. Now the SP-BSP gathbandhan is the main vikalp and, as a result, the hawa has changed direction.”
For the SP-BSP workers, the despair since March 2017 has changed to hope. Rivals may call it a mere caste coalition—Prime Minister Narendra Modi even called it a “combine of those he had prevented from looting India”— but the truth is the SP-BSP pre-poll alliance may well go down in history as the turning point in the 2019 battle for India with the firming up of a rainbow social coalition of OBCs, Dalits and Muslims who together constitute over 75 per cent of UP’s voting population.
Why the focus on UP when the election is for the entire country? Remember, UP is the country’s most populous and pivotal state with 80 MPs. The state has given India nine of its 14 prime ministers. In 2014, onefourth of the BJP’s MPs were from here. Prime Minister Narendra Modi contested from here (Varanasi) and so did Congress president Rahul Gandhi (Amethi). In the past, Sonia Gandhi has contested from Raebareli in UP and, on January 23, Priyanka Gandhi was made Congress general secretary for UP East, a region from where the Congress had won over a dozen Lok Sabha seats in 2009. Given the significance of UP in national politics, the india today-Karvy Insights Mood of the Nation (MOTN) survey carried out a separate poll in UP as a bellwether for the Lok Sabha election.
Scene 2. Kolkata. On January 19, the leaders of 22 political parties, including three current chief ministers, a few former ones, ex-cabinet ministers from NDA-1 and even a former prime minister, gathered at a massive ‘United India’ rally in Kolkata’s Brigade Grounds to lay the template for a new grand alliance to take on the BJP and its allies.
West Bengal chief minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Mamata Banerjee, who hosted the Kolkata rally, publicly declared: “Badal do, badal do, Dilli mein sarkar badal do. Let all opposition parties support the strongest BJP opponent in each Lok Sabha seat. The Modi government has reached its expiry date.”
Lucknow and Kolkata have emerged in the last fortnight as the simmering new hubs of national power politics. If Bengaluru, after the Karnataka assembly polls in May 2018, provided the photo opportunity for mahagathbandhan politics and Lucknow has laid the foundation for a formidable alliance in UP, Kolkata has surely provided the brick and mortar for the grand alliance. “So many leaders of different parties are on this dais, it is like the country has come together against the BJP. Everyone will have to come together, and we have to strongly support everyone. Collective leadership is crucial,” Mamata Banerjee said in her opening address.
Almost all the key opposition parties, barring her state rivals, the Left parties, attended the United India meet. That also jointly announced that more such gatherings would take place in the coming days. While TDP president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu announced that he was planning a massive meeting in state capital Amaravati, his Delhi counterpart, Arvind Kejriwal of AAP, indicated that a similar meet is likely in the national capital before the Lok Sabha election in 2019. From Karnataka to Lucknow, Kolkata to Amaravati, and finally to Delhi, the grand alliance has plans to stitch together pre-poll local alliances in key states and post-poll alliances across the country.
Will such an alliance be a game changer—in UP and across the country in the 2019 Lok Sabha election? Can the mahagathbandhan being forged from Lucknow to Kolkata, Hyderabad to Jammu and Kashmir challenge the Modi-led juggernaut in May 2019?
Consider what the MOTN report reveals a 100 days before the general election. When asked whether a state-level strategic alliance among opposition parties posed a serious challenge to the BJP-led NDA in the upcoming election, some 60 per cent of surveyed voters across the country said ‘yes’, just 26 per cent replied in the negative.
Since the mahagathbandhan is in the making and alliances are still in a flux, the MOTN builds three probable scenarios in the battleground state of UP, four probable scenarios in the country and finally two possible post-poll scenarios across the country. All scenarios are hypothetical, based on mathematical probabilities and estimations of vote and seat share.