Janata Parivar on verge of merger

NECESSITY is the mother not of invention alone. In this country, in particular, it also breeds political unification or fragmentation as the requirement may be. The compulsions of the six parties that are planning to merge by April 20, when the second phase of Parliament's Budget session begins, are so clear as to be visible even to the most myopic of observers. Up to May 16, 2014, each of these parties was happy to operate on its own whether in power or out of it. They were badly shaken by what Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s followers are still calling the “Modi tsunami”. Particularly shattered were Mulayam Singh Yadav, supremo of the Samajwadi Party that rules U.P., and Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) who has been ruling Bihar for a long time. It deserves a mention that these two very large states in the Hindi heartland, between them, send to the Lok Sabha 140 of its 543 members. The Bharatiya Janata Party's overwhelming victory in both these states struck the SP and the JD (U) dumb.

Since a number of byelections were due, especially in Bihar, all concerned realised that either they must unite or they might be annihilated separately. The bitterest foe of Nitish Kumar, Lalu Prasad, the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal, who had ruled the state for ten years before Nitish ousted him, became the Chief Minister's firm ally. Consequently, the two together did rather well in Bihar and the BJP could not repeat its earlier performance even though Modi was in the saddle. So Lalu's RJD is the third of the large parties anxious to merge.  Their relatively small three allies included in the merger venture are the Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana, the Janata Dal (Secular) — a legacy of former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda now run by his son in Karnataka —and the Samajwadi Janata Party, a breakaway group from UP’s ruling party. Their influence may be limited but their enthusiasm is boundless.  By November last the move for unification had been accepted by all the six parties. What gave a big push to the idea is the imminence of the assembly elections in Bihar which must take place towards the close of this year. The elections in U. P. are due in 1917. Those in West Bengal will take place earlier but Mamata Banerjee has shown no interest in the essentially northern phenomenon. However, there are three factors that make it reasonably certain that the merger plan will go through. First, everyone knows that without unity it would not be possible to keep the BJP at bay. Secondly, there is no dispute over the leadership of the new combination, which was one of the several major reasons for the ignominious self-destruction of the Janata that had come to power in the 1977 election almost entirely because of the nightmare of the Emergency. Atal Behari Vajpaee, the then Foreign Minister, had even declared that the people had “consigned Indira Gandhi into the dustbin of history”. All the six partners know that Mulayam Singh has the greatest clout and should be the leader. His party’s election symbol, the bicycle, will be the new party's emblem. Its name has yet to be chosen. Thirdly, the Modi government has lost some of its shine and is likely to lose more, especially because of its ordinance on land acquisition. It has already been branded as “anti-farmer” and yet is being re-issued! Even so, there is no guarantee that heavy bargaining among the stalwarts within the new combine will not take place and damage the venture. After all, Lalu Prasad has already told Nitish Kumar that when he returns as Chief Minister of Bihar, the post of Deputy Chief Minister must go to his daughter who is ambitious enough to have falsely claimed only the other day that she had delivered a lecture at Harvard. Most analysts of Indian politics I have talked to feel that a combined party of the six regional parties will surely materialise. But the real question is how long it will last. This question is pertinent because past experience is far from encouraging. Ram Manohar Lohia's strategy of mobilising the entire spectrum of non-Congress parties — from the Jan Sangh to the CPI (M) and call it Samyukt Vidhayak Dal — gave it victory in eight northern states. People joked that one could travel from Calcutta (now called Kolkata) to Amritsar (whose name mercifully remains unchanged) without crossing a single inch of Congress-governed territory. This glee boomeranged. For all eight non-Congress ministries collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions rather fast.   In 1971 the slogan of “Indira hatao”, coined by an alliance against her, was smashed to smithereens by her response: “Voh kehtay hain Indira hatao; mein kehti hoon garibi hatao”. No government rose to power with such gargantuan goodwill as did the Janata in the post-Emergency poll. Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay were defeated humiliatingly. The Janata Party claimed to be a single entity, not a coalition. But its mistakes were many and these included their resolve to persecute Indira Gandhi and Sanjay instead of prosecuting them for their guilt of clamping the curse of Emergency on the country. Ultimately, however, the Janata government collapsed under the unbearable weight of clashing ambitions of its three top leaders — Morarji Desai, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram — in thirty months. Indira Gandhi was back in power spectacularly. V. P. Singh also rose to power amidst huge public applause on December 2, 1989. Initially, a member of Rajiv Gandhi’s Cabinet, he eventually became his nemesis. Thanks to infighting within his party right from the start and his reckless decision to accept the Mandal Commission’s report, he fell in 11 months flat. Few regretted his early departure. However, let us not prejudge the future of the combination that is now in the making. It would be better to wait and watch.