NDA & Opposition begin to gear up for 2019

The stakes are high and this is showing up in the recent moves of our principal political parties on both sides of the divide. The ruling NDA, led by the BJP and dominated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who appears to be impregnable after his famous victory in Uttar Pradesh, has already begun taking the first steps toward consolidating the incumbent alliance, not taking anything for granted and leaving nothing to last-minute firefighting. Its scattered opponents too appear at last to have understood that unity moves do not fructify easily, and have set the process in motion long before the next Lok Sabha election in 2019.

The first formal step in this direction was taken on Wednesday, as the Budget Session of Parliament drew to a close, when a delegation of 13 parties, with the Congress being the largest in Parliament and led by party president Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, walked to Rashtrapati Bhavan to give a memorandum to President Pranab Mukherjee to highlight the alleged authoritarian conduct of the government, including the passing of measures as “money bills” in Parliament to bypass scrutiny by the Rajya Sabha, where the government is in a minority.

The meeting of the NDA the previous day, attended by the PM, would have been a shot in the arm for the ruling alliance. Uddhav Thackeray, the Shiv Sena chief, not only attended the meeting but called Mr Modi “elder brother”. In the past three years, the BJP’s oldest ally has been harrying the saffron party at every turn, but this was forgotten at the meeting. For the BJP and the NDA, which will be reduced to nothing without the former, this cannot but be a sign of hope.

The fact that the BJP is on a marked winning streak under Mr Modi’s leadership has doubtless been a factor in helping slippery parts unify within the NDA. Its opponents have had no luck on that count and are still trying to forget mutual rivalries and present a common face to the BJP, although this may take some doing.

Thus, West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress was represented at Rashtrapati Bhavan along with its bête noire, the CPI(M) and the other Left parties. From Uttar Pradesh, there was the SP and BSP, parties with a long history of mutual hostility.

The victory of the “mahagathbandhan” in Bihar last year had led some to believe that the Congress, Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal and CM Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) would strive together to act in parliamentary politics, but this expectation turned out to be exaggerated. It may, therefore, be too early to think that the Opposition parties that met the President will sort out their ambitions and mutual rivalries right away. Politics is a complicated process.