Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is all set to make the next volte-face, this time to return to the embrace of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and the putative Opposition alliance expansively labelled INDIA may be stillborn. Mr. Kumar had been at the forefront of championing a broad alliance of Opposition parties to take on the might of the ruling BJP in the upcoming general election. The Centre’s decision to honour Karpoori Thakur, an icon of social justice politics in Bihar, with the Bharat Ratna, has given Mr. Kumar a convenient excuse to warm up to the BJP. Mr. Kumar recalled his demand for conferment of the Bharat Ratna on the socialist leader since 2006, obliquely blaming the Congress which was in power then for overlooking his demand. He has also expressed the hope that other demands of Bihar would be met by the Centre, which many see as a prelude to yet another alliance between his party, the Janata Dal (United), and the BJP. Mr. Kumar has clearly distanced himself from the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal, his partners in the State government; the BJP, which had ruled out a revival of its alliance with Mr. Kumar until recently, has now said it is possible. Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Bhagwant Mann, Chief Ministers of West Bengal and Punjab, respectively, have meanwhile ruled out seat-sharing with the Congress in their States.
Except for closed door meetings followed by press conferences, the INDIA bloc has not had any big public outreach programme since its formation seven months ago in Patna. Time is running out and there is no clarity on when the bloc will be able to seal the division of seats among its constituents. The alliance is staring at a crisis in the battle of perception and in building a robust structure for a joint campaign or election strategy. The initial euphoria had blinded the parties to the political peculiarities in each State, and the ambitions and fears of regional leaders that soon began to emerge. On January 13, Ms. Banerjee skipped a virtual meeting of the bloc that had been organised in haste. The Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav also stayed away. It is still possible that partial seat sharing arrangements depending on tactical considerations in individual States might still emerge, but any programmatic national alliance against the BJP seems to be out of reach. The Opposition parties may have to look at State-level alliances, and the possibility of post-poll alliances. The BJP, meanwhile, has ramped up its campaign, not merely to win the election but also to extinguish the last signs of opposition to it.
