A yeti-like non-BJP, non-Cong front

NEW DELHI: We are at that point in a pre-election year when every regional party is jostling to get into a sweet spot from which it can reach the honey pot of power in any scenario that the fickle Indian voter can throw.

Statements made by parties during this time are characteristically full of faux vehemence and clarity. This is done in anticipation of future numbers, so there are no certainties. They therefore fall back on bravado, overstating their own significance and offering commitments that are verily negotiable.

How else can you explain the bravado issuing from the Trinamool Congress, Samajwadi Party and the Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) of forging a non-Congress front against the BJP—or as Akhilesh Yadav put it, “a front, an alliance or a mahagathbandhan or whatever you call it”.

Almost all of India’s regional party chieftains are busily looking for a chimera called ‘non-BJP, non-Congress front’, a creature of so many hyphens it cannot move. Like the yeti, it is sighted every pre-election year and once the BJP has been ensconced in the power, it retreats to the mists.

The Telangana BRS chieftain K Chandrashekar Rao chased the beast in 2018, and he is at it now, canvassing Uddhav Thackeray, MK Stalin and Naveen Patnaik. Akhilesh Yadav went to Kolkata this past weekend to make common cause with Mamata Banerjee.

The lady herself is slated to travel to Odisha this week to persuade Naveen Patnaik to join the chimerical quest. Arvind Kejriwal has convened a meeting of opposition leaders in Delhi next month to discuss the same thing: how to defeat the BJP and the Congress.

The Congress has not been above putting the cart before the horse too: Fresh from the success of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, it has been behaving as if it’s a given that only he can be the face of the opposition in the coming elections.

Mallikarjun Kharge’s speech at the Congress plenary in Raipur made it clear that the party will only accept the status of first among equals in any coalition challenging the BJP and that Rahul Gandhi will be its leader.

It is no surprise that this has gone down among the regional parties as arrogance.

The theme running through these activities is the ambition of each of these chieftains to be Prime Minister. To have such ambitions is not bad per se but it can only be countenanced if the needs of the nation are met first.

India’s interests at the moment need these leaders and parties to bring their egos down a notch. Akhilesh Yadav keeps making the claim that the path to power in New Delhi only goes through UP. He needs to remember that that shibboleth did not hold true in the Nineties and Oughties when the South was crucial to the mix.

Similarly, Mamata’s lustre as an alternative to Narendra Modi has dimmed since her victory over the BJP in West Bengal in 2021. The recent loss of the Sagardighi by-election and the Trinamool Congress’ poor performance in the Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura elections should bring her down to earth.

As for the Congress, it must remember that its status as a pan-India party has shrunk to just a few states, and that it can no longer retrieve ground it has lost to regional parties in the majority of states.

What India needs is a vigorous opposition that can offer a federal alternative to the nationalist BJP.

The main concerns of regional parties, to protect their turf in their states from any competition by the Congress, should be seconded to that national objective. And the Congress must return to the UPA I sensibility when it managed a coalition without being overbearing.