Rajeev Sharma

By : Rajeev Sharma

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) must be ruing the fact that no state assembly elections are round the corner. This is because the script of post-election Bihar is threatening to come true to the BJP advantage but the pity from the BJP’s perspective is that no assembly elections are due immediately.

Though five state assemblies are scheduled to go to polls later this year — Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Assam, Kerala and West Bengal — the earliest the elections may take place is only toward the middle of this year.

It would have been a divine stroke for Modi and the BJP if elections for these five assemblies were to take place within a few weeks, not months. That’s because of the Bihar factor, the Hindi-speaking eastern state of India which was of crucial importance for Modi’s BJP but it miserably lost the polls two months ago.

The BJP’s oft-repeated warning of “We told you so” has come about true resoundingly as the two main partners of the coalition government in Bihar — chief minister Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) — has started facing a barrage of criticism from its numerically bigger partner of Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD ) just fifty days after the grand alliance of these two regional satraps and the Congress party handed a crushing defeat to Modi’s BJP.

The issue at hand is the killings of three engineers in the state. The RJD not only distanced itself from the JD (U) over the spate of murders of engineers but it also launched a veiled attack on the Nitish government for its alleged failure of maintaining the law and order in the state. Such statements were made by the RJD’s top leaders like Lalu Yadav and his Man Friday Raghubansh Prasad Singh.

This specter was precisely forecast by PM Modi and the BJP’s top leadership during the campaigning, as they warned of internecine battles within the grand alliance if it was to be voted into power. The BJP’s projected fears have come true.

This brings us to the question posed at the very outset in this article about a coalition government, which is in a state of war with itself. The BJP had undoubtedly projected this kind of scenario but it has come too soon.

The timing of the battles within the ruling grand alliance of Bihar doesn’t favor the BJP. Conversely it doesn’t affect the ruling coalition government either.

The reason, as stated earlier, is that no elections are due for the next few months and by the time these elections fall due, in all probability, the ruling coalition government of Bihar would have taken note of it and would inevitably cool down the temperatures. In other words, the BJP may not get a chance to tell the electorate of the five election-bound assemblies to shun BJP-baiters whose one-point agenda is to malign PM Modi.

The grand alliance of Bihar was the first major experiment in forging opposition unity to keep Modi’s BJP at bay. But with open bickering within Bihar’s coalition government, the concept of opposition unity is being thrown out of the window.

Right now, the message emanating from Bihar is that while the Modi versus the rest is an effective instrument of keeping Modi at bay, the Bihar experiment faces anticipated setbacks as anti-Modi forces flounder in projecting their own solid unity. The message in one sentence is: While anti-Modism may be binding glue for the opposition, it is well nigh impossible for the stakeholders to bury their individual egos.

This is the kind of situation that favors Modi and the BJP. But the contra view is that the opposition may still have not lost much with their own wrangling within Bihar as assembly elections are months away and the voters are notorious for having a short memory.

There is an inherent message for all opposition parties at the national level here. While it may be a good idea to replicate the Bihar strategy of forging alliances at the national level too, it is easier said than done. That’s because all politicians have bloated egos. Opposition leaders are no exception to this phenomenon. They will do well to carry less ego in their heads than they carry petrol in the petrol tanks of their cars.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in the Column section are their own and do not reflect RiyadhVision’s point-of-view.

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