Shikha Mukerjee | Too many mutations hurt coalition politics’ viability

The era of coalitions, as former Marxist leader Jyoti Basu described the metamorphosis of the political landscape that began in the 1970s, continues and poses a puzzle for the Bharatiya Janata Party as well as for the partners of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance. The two sides are affected by the permutations and combinations of this mutating process.

At one level, the INDIA bloc is a natural coalition; at another, specifically at the regional level, there are not many natural partnerships. Since coalitions are crafted to consolidate votes and multiply the collective impact of the coalition by winning more seats than the parties would have had they contested separately, the failure to reach seat sharing agreements is bad for the INDIA bloc and good for the BJP.

The disarray of the parties of the coalition is a function of the ways in which they originated. Some like the Left parties, the DMK, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, even the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Shiv Sena, are rooted in specific ideologies. Others have originated as breakaways like the Trinamul Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party. Many were originally anti-Congress and remain antagonists of the party at the regional level, like Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and Pinarayi Vijayan in Kerala, while Arvind Kejriwal plays it both ways; friends in Delhi and foes in Punjab. All of them currently are anti-BJP.

The BJP has focused on the differences between the partners of the INDIA bloc and delivered a judgment that the alliance is a non-starter because it has already disintegrated. It has also pointed out that they are in cahoots to swindle the public. By clubbing one with the other, the BJP has drawn attention to the complexity of the dynamics of coalition formation in a difficult political landscape.

The dynamics has gifted the BJP the advantage of appearing to be uncomplicated, stable, organised and well-endowed with a masterful single leader, that is, a helmsman who calls the shots. In contrast, the INDIA bloc appears to be unstable, disorganised, hopelessly complicated by cross cutting interests and too many leaders, but no identifiable icon.

The inevitable problems and failures of seat-sharing, the exit of Nitish Kumar and the breakup of the “Mahagatbandhan” in Bihar have contributed to the idea that the INDIA bloc is precarious and unfit to function as an alternative to the BJP led by its helmsman.

The idea of the new formation mutating into a coherent, organised merged entity was a myth; Mamata Banerjee said so; and her friends including Arvind Kejriwal and Akhilesh Yadav agreed. As an alliance, all the stakeholders and even the BJP knew that the differences at the regional level would not end just because INDIA had been birthed. The formula proposed by Mamata Banerjee that each regional and dominant party fight the BJP on its home turf, preferably in one-on-one contests, was not entirely wrong; but it was not realistic either.

Assessing the potential and the capacity of the coalition is therefore a more complex task. Is the coalition so powerful that even Prime Minister Narendra Modi can be intimidated? In Meerut, on the same day as the INDIA bloc’s huge rally at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, Mr Modi said that “I am not scared”, implying that the Opposition was trying to instil fear to prevent him from taking action against their many acts of corruption.

In other words, the public discourse has two images of the Opposition and of Mr Modi: the first is a collective of the powerful and the second is a shambolic collective, full of internal contradictions, that can come apart. The carefully cultivated twin images of Mr Modi are first, the man who means business; purposeful and powerful enough to deliver on his guarantees; and second, a lonely, tireless crusader against the evils of corruption, dynastic politics and divisiveness.

The absurdity of the image of a scared Narendra Modi is striking and deserves to be deciphered as a tactical move.

Is the BJP’s helmsman calling his core support base to rally for him? If that is so, he must feel less confident about winning his target 370 seats out of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha in this election. But that cannot be true, because Mr Modi’s campaign has focused on his “guarantees” of delivering a fully developed economy to the masses in his third term, which implies that he is supremely confident of returning to the job as Prime Minister.

Confounding as these twists and turns are in the BJP’s campaign narrative, the reality is the Opposition is neither nimble nor quick-witted enough to checkmate these moves. Expressing fears that the elections will be like a “fixed” cricket match where the field is staged for a victory of the BJP and the return of Mr Modi as Prime Minister for a third term is not a response that says anything new or even says the same thing differently.

The Ramlila Maidan rally was an opportunity for the collective Opposition to make its pitch to voters across the country as all the coalition partners from the different states were part of the meeting. Its failure to do so exposes the absence of a strategy to counter the BJP’s narrative and present a new alternative narrative to voters.

Asking voters to choose between dictatorship and democracy is not the same as asking voters to choose between keeping Arvind Kejriwal incarcerated or releasing him; the first is an abstract idea, the second is specific and is a call to act. Talking “match-fixing” does not engage with voters proactively. The INDIA bloc leadership obviously has not worked out exactly what it expects voters to do, beyond suggesting “No Vote to the BJP”.

In contrast, the BJP’s campaign is in two registers, simultaneously inviting voters to take its side against the collective Opposition on the one hand and the regional parties on the other because it is the only choice that guarantees stability in uncertain times. By crafting the conditions of uncertainty, the BJP has converted the destabilisation of the Opposition, especially the state ruling parties, into a new strategy of stripping political capital by engineering defections, splitting parties and arresting chief ministers, both present and past, namely Mr Kejriwal and Hemant Soren, who resigned before his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate.

The INDIA bloc has been so distracted by the destabilisation strategy that it has not found the time to evolve into an alternative and remains stuck in its role as the Opposition; always the challenger and never the new champion.