Despite what BJP says, monoliths are a myth in Indian politics

The 2024 elections will be a contest between alliances. One alliance will be headed by the BJP. Who heads the other alliance or alliances is an open question.

By branding the opposition efforts at building an alliance as an opportunistic polarisation of dynastic politics to shield massive corruption, the BJP has successfully constructed a false narrative of its invincibility and its outsize strength and influence, leveraging the idea that there is no alternative to Narendra Modi as prime minister. The reality is the BJP heads the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and has done so since 1998.

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Coalitions are the norm in contemporary politics. That has been so since 1977. For Lok Sabha elections, it is imperative for self-styled monoliths like the BJP to acquire allies, just as it is for Congress. 

The opposition of regional parties and small parties working to stitch together an alliance in the run-up to the 2024 general elections is no different, except for the fact that the front, “main” or “only” or whatever be its name in the future, are all stars and emphatically not satellites.

NDA and UPA differ

The status of these parties is different from the satellites that constitute the NDA or the parties that have been in alliance with the Congress as part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA). There is a difference between the NDA and the UPA of the past. The Congress coalition had several parties that were ruling parties in the states. The NDA in 2022 and probably in 2024 has or will have mostly small and tiny parties that cannot clamour for power and bargain hard because of their strong bases in the states.

The principal differences between the BJP-led NDA — at the Centre and in the states where it is the ruling party — and the opposition’s multiplicity of initiatives, each spearheaded by one regional party leader or another, to build a stable coalition against the BJP to oust Modi, can be boiled down to two points. 

First, the anti-BJP opposition coalition-building exercise does not have a strong centralising force, in sharp contrast to the role of the BJP in the NDA or the Congress in the UPA. The opposition does not have a consensus prime ministerial candidate. 

Second, the BJP has succeeded in captivating significantly large chunks of Hindu voters with its One Nation-One Party slogan. The centralising politics promoted by the BJP as part of its hegemonist ideology that is rooted in the goal of Akhand Bharat, or Undivided India, knit together on the foundations of majoritarian religious identity and its Hindutva creed, has the entire nation in thrall.

Striving for allies

In the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, it is in the BJP’s interest to rope in more allies and encourage breakaways from the ‘other’ side. It needs the add-ons because it is fully aware that anti-incumbency is going to work against it in various states, where it is perceived as the ruling party rather than the big party heading an alliance. The ‘other’ alliance is working on the same strategy of adding more parties to stitch together a broader appeal in the hope that every new partner works as a vote multiplier.

Predicting that some of the current opposition allies could switch sides and end up with the BJP is risky. It is equally uncertain that the allies of the BJP, and it has many, will stay with the NDA. On the one hand, there is Modi and his extraordinary election-winning power and on the other is the anti-incumbency that, like a spectre, stalks him and the BJP at the Centre and in key states where the party has been in power for more than one term.

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The stability of the BJP-led alliance or coalition is relative. The instability of the other alliance is beyond argument. There are stars in the other alliance and each of these stars has been working to acquire allies. Mamata Banerjee is friends with some, but only some of the time. Telangana Rashtra Samithi supremo K Chandrashekhar Rao’s proposal for a “main front” by discarding the tattered “Third Front” tag has some friends and some foes, but only some of the time.

The main front or only front’s most active advocate is Nitish Kumar after he switched to the opposition by toppling the BJP alliance government in Bihar, positioning himself as everyone’s friend and found a partner in Lalu Prasad and his Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Congress and the Left, with Sitaram Yechury describing the defection as ghar wapsi. 

In this shifting kaleidoscope of parties, the Left – CPI M, CPI and Dipankar Bhattacharya-led Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist) Liberation – make no pretensions about their role and status; they are small parties that will join an anti-BJP alliance because that is the ideological fight to which they are already committed.

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Vote multiplying coalition

The BJP, too, knows that its phenomenal election successes since 2014 are, in fact, a product of its capacity to stitch together a seat-sharing, vote-multiplying coalition of tiny, small caste-based regional parties. Its narrative of the BJP as the only alternative — its One Nation-One Party spiel — is a myth, fabricated to project the party as a super strong monolith. The Modi regime has succeeded in controlling the tiny, caste-based parties in the rainbow coalition it heads, by impressing upon them that the deal with the BJP has been to their advantage.

That such deals are to the advantage of the BJP is obvious. Its government in Uttar Pradesh is another rainbow alliance, where tiny parties like the Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party, the Apna Dal faction led by Anupriya Patel, the Nishad Party, have clout. Without the North East Democratic Alliance, the BJP would not have been in a position to declare that it represents every corner of India.

Small but key constituents

These are parties that represent voters with aspirations and ambitions that cannot be fulfilled by the ‘national parties’. In a national party, the capacity of castes/communities like the Rajbhars or the Nishads or the Majhis to negotiate for the spoils of office, especially in a government at the Centre, would be very limited.

Caste-based parties, or parties based on ethnic identities like the Bodoland People’s Front, United Peoples’ Party Liberal or the Asom Gana Parishad, the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura, are entities that have emerged to specifically represent their constituents and are crucial for the BJP in winning states like Assam and Tripura; local allies have put the BJP in power in Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal.

The BJP is fully aware of the imperative to include parties that represent specific constituents. After the Akali Dal ended its decades-old alliance with the BJP, it looked for and found a partner in Amarinder Singh to make up for its loss. The alliance with Eknath Shinde in Maharashtra is a political compulsion; he and his supporters represent the Maratha voter.

Constituents of the NDA are clued into their role, as vote catchers for the BJP. The party’s masterminds are fully aware that there is mounting disappointment with the Modi model of government that has made life unpredictably miserable by actively promoting measures that have pushed the effects of the pre-pandemic slowing economy into a full-blown cost of living crisis. 

The ingredients for the disappointment have all been provided by the Modi regime – starting with the promise of ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’, one crore job creation, demonetisation and the botched roll-out of GST. The dismay is now out in the open, with the recent critique of India’s misery by RSS second in command, Dattatreya Hosabale, on growing inequality, rising poverty and spiralling unemployment.

The many faces of opposition

Up against the NDA led by BJP, the disorderly and heterogeneous opposition of regional and small parties with conflicting and contradictory interests does seem an improbable enemy. The opposition looks like a crazy mosaic without a coherent design that changes every time a few leaders meet to take the process of alliance formation one step further.

For risk-averse voters, the prospect of an opposition alliance that is pitching itself as an alternative to the BJP in 2024 may be even less appealing after the shambolic state of affairs within the Congress that cannot get its act together on finding a president other than a member of the Gandhi family. Arriving at a conclusion that opposition alliances cannot work in these circumstances is entirely valid for pundits and voters.

Does this mean that regional parties and smaller parties are dispensable in Indian politics? Does it mean that the future is One Nation-One Party, or as Modi pitched it in Ahmedabad recently, that the “double engine sarkar”, works best? In Gujarat politics, the principle of one party-one state makes sense. As it does in West Bengal, where the Trinamool Congress, on its own, is the ruling party, or in Delhi, where the AAP is in total control, or in Rajasthan or Chhattisgarh where the Congress is the ruling party. 

In other states, from Uttar Pradesh, to Tamil Nadu to Kerala to Karnataka to Maharashtra to Assam and the other states in the North-East, the idea of one ruling party and no allies is politically abominable.

Comforting stability

The monolithic BJP, with its centralised command and control structure, stable and successful leadership of Modi and Amit Shah as the face and the mastermind of the organisation, has a reassuring solidity that is very appealing to voters and amateur tea-stall political pundits as well as professionals. Voters do not have to keep track of what the parties in the NDA say or do, because the BJP has them on a tight leash.

The opposition alliance, in contrast, speaks in many voices, does not see eye to eye and keeps changing its mind. All this was very evident in Haryana, at the meet to remember Devi Lal organised by the Indian National Lok Dal on September 25 at Fatehabad. There was a sizable turnout of opposition leaders, including Nitish Kumar, Sitaram Yechury, Sukhbir Singh Badal of the Akali Dal and Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party. The Congress, however, was not invited. Mamata Banerjee dropped out with no explanations.

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The BJP needs tiny, caste-based regional parties for its survival. The anti-BJP opposition needs to consolidate its partnerships to prevent the BJP from poaching. Between now and 2024, there will be a race to hold on to allies, acquire new ones or create new parties that represent tinier fragments of a specific caste, community, ethnicity or identity.

(Shikha Mukerjee is a political commentator for print, digital and television. She was political editor of The Times of India in Kolkata.)

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