Opposition unity: It takes many to tango, few to come apart

But for Indira Gandhi’s extremely repressive measures, it is doubtful if the four ideologically diverse parties could have come together to form the Janata Party and unseat the Congress nationally for the first time after 1947.

Despite some moves towards unity in the run up to the Emergency rule clamped in June 1975, opposition leaders were poles apart as they cooled their heels in prisons or were on parole on health grounds in the mid-1970s.

Imprisonment of course provided a great opportunity to leaders at various levels of the Jana Sangh, Old Congress, Socialist Party and Lok Dal to exchange views on the road ahead. But with no sign as to when the Emergency would end, if at all, some even contemplated surrendering to the government.

This is when an overconfident Indira Gandhi, otherwise an astute political animal, made a blunder. She concluded on the basis of all that she knew that a snap general election would tear apart the egoistic opposition stalwarts.

That may well have happened but for Jayaprakash Narayan, the undisputed leader of the anti-Congress bandwagon who made it clear that he would bless the 1977 Lok Sabha battle only if the opposition united, not otherwise.

Initially, Indira Gandhi, egged on by her aggressive younger son Sanjay, remained confident that she would be able to make it though there was mounting anger on the streets over the excesses of Emergency rule and the prime minister began apologizing at one public meeting after another.

It is true that fortune favours the brave; in politics, you also need to be lucky.

Indira Gandhi suffered a mortal blow when Congress stalwart Jagjivan Ram quit the Congress in February 1977 along with Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and Nandini Satpathy and formed the Congress for Democracy (CFD). Jagjivan Ram’s desertion and his denunciation of Emergency was a coup that tremendously weakened Indira Gandhi.

This was a lucky break for the nascent Janata Party, whose constituents, after decades of being at each other’s throat, were putting up a strong show of unity, determined to field only one candidate against the Congress everywhere so that opposition votes did not splinter.

This meant that Janata Party leaders Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Ashok Mehta, George Fernandes, Biju Patnaik, LK Adani, Atal Bihari Vajpayee – who between them represented the Old Congress, Lok Dal, Socialist Party and Jana Sangh – had to make major compromises to present a united face. Anything less could not have worked.

The Janata Party’s strategy worked so well that anti-Congress votes got consolidated, delivering an unprecedented rout for the country’s oldest party that had ruled India continuously since independence. From Amritsar to Calcutta, the Congress was wiped out although it put up a strong showing in south India, partly because the region suffered much less during Emergency.

The 19 months of Emergency rule, during which the media was muzzled and opposition activists of all hues were jailed in thousands, formally ended at the final cabinet meeting presided over by Indira Gandhi after the election results became known.

Once the objective of ousting Indira Gandhi got over, the Janata Party could not remain united too long and imploded within two years, leading to a dramatic return to power of the Congress. By then, Jayaprakash Narayan, the moral guardian of the Janata Party, was no more.

If Indira Gandhi was the reason why the opposition came together in 1977, then it was her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi who was the glue that brought about another pan-India opposition unity which ended up unseating the BJP’s most populous face until then, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in 2004.

After six years in power, during which Vajpayee carried out nuclear tests and presided over a military victory over Pakistan at Kargil, the BJP was riding high with what it thought was a winning slogan: Shining India. Few in the BJP could gauge the innate political acumen Sonia Gandhi had as she decided to stitch together an alliance that would take on the charismatic Vajpayee-Advani pair and their own regional allies.

The Congress launched an advertisement blitzkrieg nationwide that matched some of the catchy slogans it had unleashed to put down the Janata Party in 1980. More important, Sonia Gandhi took the initiative to reach out to everyone, including those who were traditional Congress baiters. At one point, she simply walked over from her 10 Janpath residence in the heart of Delhi to her next door neighbour Ram Vilas Paswan to welcome him into the fold of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA).

More than her own colleagues, she was helped in her efforts to bring together the opposition by two men who enjoyed great prestige across the political spectrum: Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet, two of the nine members of the CPI(M)’s founding politburo in 1964. Surjeet in particular kept underlining the need for the opposition to shake hands to oust what he dubbed the “communal BJP”.

In the end, the BJP suffered a humiliating defeat, leading to a decade of Congress-led UPA rule. Sonia Gandhi, while refusing to take up the post of the prime minister, became the cementing force behind Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the multi-party UPA. It is another story that like the Janata Party in 1977, the Congress was badly bruised in 2014, a debilitating injury it is yet to recover from.

In contrast to the UPA experiment, two other times opposition parties came together to form coalition governments ended up in disaster, leading to questions whether hurried unity efforts can stand the test of time as well as pressures of governance.

The first was in 1989 when former Congress leader Vishwanath Pratap Singh became the prime minister at the head of a National Front with the backing of the mutually antagonistic BJP and Left parties. VP Singh had to give up power within a year when BJP’s Advani was arrested while taking out a Rath Yatra in support of a temple to be built at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya; the BJP quickly withdrew its legislative support, reducing the government to a minority.

The next occasion was in 1996 when diverse regional parties came together under the banner of the United Front and took power after Vajpayee resigned as prime minister as he could not prove his majority in the Lok Sabha. This experiment was backed both by the Congress and the Left. The Congress, in a hurry to claw back to power on its own, did not allow the coalition to succeed, leading to two prime ministers in quick succession. Vajpayee made mincemeat of the United Front and its backers in parliament debates and ultimately rode back to office.

All these experiments make one thing abundantly clear: it is easy for a diverse set of opposition parties to rally together, particularly if they have strong reasons to do so. But shedding multiple egos and giving up perceived areas of strongholds is never an easy task. The differences can be overcome provided there is an overarching leader to smoothen out difficult compromises. Jayaprakash Narayan was one such individual in 1977 and so was Sonia Gandhi in a later era. Vajpayee too had both the personality and the democratic spirit to carry everyone along. Not so VP Singh, HD Dewe Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral, however sincere they may have been.

As of today, with just a year to go for the next Lok Sabha battle, opposition parties are far from forging a united front notwithstanding the increasing floor coordination both in parliament and outside. It is evident that not all the non-BJP parties are on the same page, on issues ranging from the Congress, which insists on being the nationwide glue, to Gautam Adani. While some opposition parties will gladly sail with the Congress as long as they can be the dominant force in their strongholds, not everyone looks similarly well disposed towards the country’s oldest party. More important, despite Rahul Gandhi’s growth in stature, there is none in the opposition ranks who can today match the mass appeal of Narendra Modi, thanks in part to the brazen bias in dominant sections of the media. This does not mean the opposition cannot unite ahead of 2024; it only means that they have a long way to go — to succeed.