Congress can’t afford to ignore smaller parties

THE Congress leadership may be inclined to view the decision of the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party to not have any alliance with it in the Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh as a minor matter as they are small players in these states and the grand old party alone is in contention with the Bharatiya Janata Party for power.

Currently, all the three states are under BJP rule. Rajasthan has lately voted the BJP and the Congress to power in alternate elections, but the BJP has had three successive wins in both MP and Chhattisgarh. Early pre-poll surveys have indicated that the Congress can come back to power in Rajasthan and take at least one of the two other states in the November-December Assembly elections. The survey results must not delude the Congress into believing that it can afford to ignore small parties.

The Assembly elections in the three states must not be viewed in too narrow a framework. They are crucial in the context of their common desire to keep Hindutva at bay.

The key to stopping the Hindutva juggernaut in next year's Lok Sabha elections lies in denying the BJP the opportunity to consolidate its position in the Hindi region. Ten states of the region accounted for 180 of the 282 seats which gave the BJP a majority in the Lok Sabha in 2014. Rajasthan, MP, and Chhattisgarh gave it 62 of their 65 seats.

The BJP had gained power in all three states in 2013 with a minority of votes — 45.17 per cent in Rajasthan, 44.88 per cent in Madhya Pradesh and 41.18 per cent in Chhattisgarh. The Congress polled 33.01 per cent in Rajasthan, 36.38 per cent in MP and 40.29 per cent in Chhattisgarh.

In the Lok Sabha elections the following year, the BJP made a big surge, thanks to the noisy campaign its prime-ministerial candidate Narendra Modi mounted and the quiet work the cadres deployed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh did at the grassroots level. It took all of Rajasthan's 25 seats with 55.61 per cent votes, 27 of MP's 29 seats with 54.78 per cent votes and 10 of Chhattisgarh's 11 seats with 49.66 per cent votes.

The lesson to draw from these figures is that these states have a substantial number of people who are liable to be swayed by a focused campaign which creates a winning air.

In the last Assembly elections there was a wide gap between the vote shares of the Congress and the BSP and an even wider one between those of the Congress and the SP.  Small as these parties are, they are known to draw support from specific social groups and an alliance with them may help the Congress to create a winning air in these states.

Seat-sharing in elections is a ticklish issue. It can become extremely difficult when larger parties overestimate their strength and smaller ones are overambitious.  Rarely do parties approach the issue with a sense of realism.

A rule-of-thumb formula which can smoothen the process is for the parties to accept the vote share in the previous elections as a measure of their strength in a state and divide all the seats in that state among them in that proportion. It may be a good idea for the two largest parties to first divide all the seats between them and then part with some from their shares to accommodate other, smaller parties which they wish to bring into the alliance.  

In Rajasthan, this formula will require the Congress and the BSP, which had secured 33.01 per cent votes and 3.21 per cent votes respectively, to share the state's 200 seats in the ratio of 33:3. This will give the Congress 183 seats and the BSP 17.

In MP, the Congress had a vote share of 36.38 per cent and the BSP 6.29 per cent. When the state's 230 seats are shared in the ratio of 36:6, the Congress will get 197 and the BSP 33.

In Chhattisgarh, the Congress polled 40.29 per cent votes and the BSP's 4.27 per cent.  Division of the state's 90 seats in the 40:4 ratio will give the Congress 82 and the BSP eight.

As the largest opposition parties of Uttar Pradesh, it will be for the SP and the BSP to take the lead in seat-sharing in that state for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Quite often different considerations weigh with the voters in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. It will, therefore, be appropriate to use the'2014 Lok Sabha vote share as the basis for division of LS seats.

The BSP and the SP are parties which grew up in opposition to the Congress. The history of past hostility and the fear of possible future hostility are bound to cast a shadow over their efforts to reach an electoral understanding with the Congress to forge a united front against the Hindutva forces. They must realise that while the Congress is down, it is still the largest party in the secular camp and at this stage it is in their interest to work hand in hand with it.

The Congress leaders, on their part, must realise that the social forces which sustain the BSP and the SP moved away from their party because it had failed to fulfill their legitimate aspirations. Now its best chances of attracting these sections lie in working with these parties.

Such a realisation on both sides will clear the way for working out suitable adjustments ahead of next year's elections.

It is still not too late for the non-BJP parties to review their election strategy in MP, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. As a first step, the Congress and the BSP should explore the possibility of seat-sharing on the basis of their strength, as reflected in the Assembly vote shares. Thereafter, they should try to bring the SP also in even though it does not have a single seat in the outgoing Assemblies and its vote share in the last elections was in the low range of 1.20 per cent to 0.29 per cent. That may encourage the SP and the BSP to be generous to the Congress while sharing the Lok Sabha seats next year.