United Opposition Front Against Modi In 2019 Seems A Wishful Thinking Now

The Bharatiya Janata Party(BJP) can breathe easy. As of now, it seems highly improbable that any united Opposition front led by Nitish Kumar or anybody else will come up to take on Prime minister Narendra Modi ahead of the next parliamentary polls.

Uncertainty thy name is politics, we all know. Still, given the prevailing political circumstances, the parties opposed to the NDA are too fragmented to arrive at any consensus on their common mission to checkmate Modi in the 2019 battle for Delhi.

Even though the general elections are barely two years away, the Prime minister’s opponents appear to have learnt no lesson from the recent drubbing in the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls. Except leaders such as Bihar Chief minister Nitish Kumar and his ally, Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad who, of course, know what unity means in a fight against a common enemy.

Post-UP election, Lalu has called upon the leaders of all secular parties, especially Samajwadi Party founder Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party president Mayawati, to come together on one platform to defeat Modi. “If it happens, the saffron party’s game plan will be finished,” he points out.

But Lalu also knows that it is easier said than done. In fact, to use a cliché, it seems easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to make bitter political foes to drop the baggage of their past and join hands for a common cause. Many attempts to forge a lasting unity within the Opposition have been made in the past but the end-results have invariably been disappointing.

What has then prompted Lalu to make another bid to bring all anti-Modi forces on a common platform? After Bihar and UP assembly polls, he knows it too well that a united opposition front alone can halt the Modi juggernaut in its tracks in the next Lok Sabha polls.

It must still be fresh in his mind how his decision to bury the hatchet with Nitish, his long-standing political enemy, and stitch together a grand alliance of RJD, Janata Dal-United and the Congress two years ago paid handsome returns, bringing his party back into power after a decade of political wilderness in his state. Poll statistics have proved time and again that split in the Opposition votes has always benefited the BJP.

Unfortunately, other than Nitish, nobody shares Lalu's enthusiasm at the moment for a common fight against Modi. Given BSP's fate in UP, Mayawati should ideally have been the first to respond to Lalu’s suggestion but she is not at all keen on being part of a coalition which may not declare her as its prime ministerial candidate.

Mulayam, too, has his reasons to keep quiet. Dumped by son Akhilesh Yadav in the run-up to the UP polls, he has shown no eagerness to take any initiative in response to Lalu’s move. In any case, whatever decision is to be taken in this regard will be taken by his son who has divested him of all his power in the party. But will it be possible and pragmatic for a young leader like Akhilesh to accept Mayawati or, for that matter, anybody else as the leader of the new coalition when he himself had elbowed his formidable father out of his party’s top position to pursue his own ambition not so long ago.

In fact, Mayawati will not be accepted to JD-U either. The party thinks it own leader Nitish is tailor-made for the post of the prime minister because of his good administrative record and clean image. Besides, the success of the Grand Alliance led by him in the last state election in Bihar has made him a natural front-runner among the Opposition leaders in the race to challenge Modi.

But let us ponder over it. Will Nitish’s leadership be acceptable to his counterparts in West Bengal and Odisha who have had similar records in their respective states. Mamata Bannerjee is already miffed with Nitish for his open support to Modi on demonetisation while Naveen Patnaik has had a consistent track record as well in his state over the years. Moreover, others like the Left Front as well as regional parties such as AIADMK and DMK in Tamil Nadu may well have their own viewpoints over the leadership issue.

Above all, will the Congress accept Nitish as its leader at the cost of Rahul Gandhi? The Congress may have put up a dismal performance in the past few elections but the party will certainly not like to project an outsider as the worthiest leader to oust Modi in a coalition. Nitish, on his part, also knows that any single coalition against Modi at the national level will hardly be effective if the Congress is not a part of it.

On the face of it, Nitish does appear to be the best bet at the moment for the Opposition to challenge Modi but his party does not have enough MPs of its own to bolster his candidature. BJP’s senior leader Sushil Kumar Modi says even Mamata’s party has more MPs than JD-U’s in Parliament.
Nitish is aware of all these facts. That is why he has reiterated time and again that he does not harbour any prime ministerial ambition. It is only a fractured verdict tilted in favour of the anti-BJP coalition that can catapult Nitish as a contender to the top post in the post-2019 poll scenario.

Where does it leave Lalu’s campaign then? Will Opposition unity ahead of general elections remain a mirage in the run-up to 2019? Will leaders of different parties, including the Congress, set aside personal ambitions and arrive at a consensus before 2019 to project somebody like Nitish or Mayawati as their consensus prime ministerial candidate?
Although impossible is nothing in politics, it seems unlikely that it will happen.

The BJP leaders, therefore, can take it easy now. They need to lose sleep only if all the cooks in the Opposition ranks agree to work on a common recipe and not spoil their poll broth before 2019.