Yashwant Sinha begins campaign from Kerala in search of elusive opposition unity

Former Union minister Yashwant Sinha begins his campaign from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram on Wednesday (June 29) as “candidate of the combined opposition parties” for the July 18 Presidential polls.

With the state’s rival political blocs – the ruling LDF coalition of Left parties and the Congress-led UDF coalition – backing Sinha’s candidature, Kerala as his first port of call in his fortnight-long campaign is, perhaps, a deliberate choice. The expected endorsement in Kerala is meant to bolster the 84-year-old Sinha’s assertion of being a consensus opposition candidate pitted against the BJP-led NDA coalition’s nominee, former Jharkhand governor Droupadi Murmu.

It has never been in doubt that in the Electoral College that picks the new President, Murmu’s victory against Sinha is guaranteed. The NDA already has a near 49 per cent vote share in the 4,809-member Electoral College. Murmu, the first tribal woman set to be elected President of India, has got official endorsements for her candidature from Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and is likely to get another from Andhra CM Jagan Mohan Reddy’s YSRCP too, all technically parties from the opposition bloc. These additional votes should make Murmu’s already assured ride to victory more comfortable as they’ll guarantee her a vote share of over 50 per cent in the Electoral College.

Symbolic contest

As such, the challenge before Sinha in his largely symbolic contest with Murmu – one he has repeatedly described as a clash not of individuals but ideologies – is to consolidate as many votes as possible from the opposition parties and, with the next Lok Sabha polls just two years away, act as a catalyst for opposition unity against the electoral might of the BJP. In the process, Sinha may also be hoping to narrow the victory margin between the NDA and its rivals in the current Presidential polls from what it was in 2017 when Ramnath Kovind defeated the opposition’s consensus candidate, Meira Kumar, with a lead of 3,34,730 votes in the Electoral College.

Also read: ‘Fight between ideologies not individuals’: Yashwant Sinha after filing nomination

However, to equate the endorsement Sinha is expected to get from Kerala’s bitterly acrimonious political blocs with a wider, pan-India consolidation of the opposition against the BJP-led NDA would be grossly misleading. Ditto for Sinha’s claims of being a “candidate of the combined opposition parties”.

In fact, if calculations by sources across opposition parties, including those backing Sinha, are anything to go by, Murmu may defeat her rival by a greater margin than the one Kovind registered against Kumar.

When Sinha’s name was formally announced as a Presidential candidate on June 21 after three others – Sharad Pawar, Farooq Abdullah and Gopalkrishna Gandhi – turned down a similar offer, he had the backing of 17 opposition parties, including the Congress party, NCP, DMK, Trinamool Congress, CPM, CPI, Shiv Sena, National Conference, Samajwadi Party, RJD, RLD and the AIUDF.

This grouping itself showed that though Sinha did have the support of a sizeable chunk of opposition parties, he was certainly not a candidate for the “combined Opposition” as important non-NDA and non-UPA regional outfits such as the BSP, BJD, TRS, AAP and YSRCP weren’t rallying behind him.

Fissures in opposition

Hours after Sinha’s candidature was announced, the BJP declared Murmu as the nominee of the NDA. On June 27, as Sinha went to file his nomination, the effect of Murmu’s candidature on the changed equations in the Electoral College were evident. The JMM, a constituent of the UPA and senior partner of the Congress in the Jharkhand government, kept its distance from Sinha. The BSP and the BJD had, by then, already declared their support for Murmu.

Sources told The Federal that the JMM is unlikely to back Sinha against Murmu. Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, who has had meetings with Union home minister Amit Shah as well as Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge over the past week, is yet to officially endorse either of the Presidential candidates. However, sources say he has conveyed to Kharge that the JMM will not be able to support Sinha against a tribal candidate as this would send a wrong political message to the party’s main vote bank – the tribals of Jharkhand. Sinha, on his part, told The Federal on June 27 that he was still “hopeful” of getting the JMM’s support and will “personally reach out to Hemant Soren”.

Refusing to support a tribal who could be the first woman from the electorally sizeable community to become India’s next President makes it difficult for parties such as the JMM or the many regional outfits from tribal-dominated states of the north-east to endorse Sinha. Even among the parties that are officially backing Sinha, there are groups of MLAs from tribal-dominated regions – Congress MLAs in Chhattisgarh and MP being a case in point – who have been expressing their dilemma to their leadership over voting for an upper caste candidate against a tribal nominee.

Such fragmentation in polling for the Presidential election is not unusual. Mere announcement of support by a political party to a candidate is no guarantee that every lawmaker of the party will vote for the chosen nominee as Presidential polls are conducted through secret ballot and are immune to party whips. For example, in 2017, the collective value of voting points among parties that were officially backing Kovind stood at 6,61,278 votes against 4,34,241 votes among the parties backing Kumar. However, when results for the 2017 Presidential polls were announced, Kovind had polled 7,02,044 votes against 3,67,314 votes polled by Kumar.

Fear of central agencies

Sources across the opposition spectrum say the electoral considerations of such parties and lawmakers in not backing Sinha aside, there are also factors like fear and intimidation that could queer the pitch further for the 84-year-old political veteran. For instance, while constituents of the ruling MVA government in Maharashtra are backing Sinha officially, the political drama playing out in the state for the past 10 days has made it clear that the former Union minister is unlikely to get full support of the current block of Shiv Sena lawmakers, particularly the rebel MLAs.

Also read: Ignored by Opposition, Mayawati supports Murmu for President

Similarly, though Sinha enjoys a personal rapport with senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh, sources say the party that now has a sizeable presence in the Electoral College because of its mandates in Delhi and Punjab is all set to vote for Murmu. The AAP stayed away from meetings convened by opposition leaders Sharad Pawar and Mamata Banerjee to discuss the Presidential candidate and it did not send any representative to accompany Sinha when he filed his nomination papers. Sources in the AAP and Sinha’s campaign office told The Federal that Arvind Kejriwal’s party was “unlikely” to vote against the BJP nominee as “given the arrest of Satyendra Jain (Delhi’s health minister) by the ED and the way central agencies were being used to target opposition leaders, the AAP did not want to attract the Centre’s ire”.

Of course, it hasn’t been all bad for Sinha. Parties such as Telangana CM K Chandrasekhar Rao’s TRS and Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, which had not backed his candidature when it was first announced, have now extended their endorsements to him. However, the larger consolidation that Sinha and his backers such as the Congress, Left parties, NCP and the Trinamool were hoping to achieve remains elusive for now – as does the dream of opposition unity against a ruthlessly aggressive BJP.