The Sharad Yadav show

In 1974 Sharad Yadav was a young 26-year-old lad, just out of an engineering college.  He found himself projected as the joint opposition candidate in a byelection for the Jabalpur Lok Sabha constituency. And he won, getting the better of combined resourcefulness of a powerful prime minister (Indira Gandhi) and her all-pervasive Congress Party. Many historians regard Sharad Yadav’s Jabalpur victory as a turning point in Indian politics, almost force-scripting the Emergency drama. Since that heady baptism, Sharad Yadav has been seen as a man who never achieved his political potential. He has always been uncomfortable playing second fiddle to this or that “tall leader” but he never acquired a mass appeal to strike out on his own. 

Now, 43 years later, he seeks again a limelight for himself, as the possible pivot around which a semblance of opposition unity be once again organised. It took considerable courage and conviction on his part to part company with Nitish Kumar when the Bihar Chief Minister opportunistically ditched the Mahagathbandhan to go back to the NDA and his old partners in the political crime.  On Thursday, he could attract an impressive array of opposition leaders and voices to his forum, designed to protect India’s composite culture, supposedly under siege from the BJP-RSS combine. This gathering is the first sign that the Opposition forces remain unintimidated and are recovering their breath. 

As in 1974, Sharad Yadav seeks to become the catalyst for opposition unity. The mathematical argument for opposition unity is obvious: the BJP and its allies do not notch up more than a 40 per cent of vote share, yet walk away with a much larger share of seats. If all or even a substantive portion of this non-BJP vote gets coalesced, then a kind of 1977 can get replicated. But elections are much more than numbers. The country would need to be given a good and credible reason to move away from its current infatuation with Prime Minister Modi. It is here that Sharad Yadav has a role to play: he should take the lead in morally re-purposing the idea of Opposition unity.