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Monday, Feb 28, 2005

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UPA SCORES OWN GOALS

IF THE 14TH general election was all about winning through alliances, Assembly elections 2005 tell the same story in reverse. A broken alliance is the shortest and surest route to defeat. Last summer a Congress on the defensive and far from confident about its own vote-pulling capabilities built a winning coalition of national and regional parties. The United Progressive Alliance stood as a testimony to secular unity and surprised the pundits. Nine months on, the UPA has all but snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in two of the three States that went to the polls — and for reasons only too obvious. In both Bihar and Jharkhand, the Congress displayed mindless arrogance in wrecking the alliance that brought it handsome victories in the Lok Sabha election. In Bihar, the party leading the Central Government set out to prove it was a force to reckon with and bit the dust. Its limited alliance with the Lok Jana Shakti Party notwithstanding, it could not even hold the 12 seats it had in the outgoing Assembly. Worse, it inflicted crushing losses on its ally, the Rashtriya Janata Dal. In Jharkhand, the Congress went against alliance dharma and excluded the RJD from its seat-sharing pact with the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. In the event, favourites JMM and the Congress finished well behind the Bharatiya Janata Party-Janata Dal(United) combine. When elections were announced to the State Assemblies of Bihar, Jharkhand, and Haryana, the arithmetic was so overwhelmingly in favour of the UPA that it looked set for a 3-0 sweep.

Today the UPA can claim only one unambiguous success — in Haryana. The Congress will no doubt take credit for its landslide victory in this State. Nonetheless, it would do well to temper its euphoria by considering two factors that contributed to this triumph. The mood on the ground was strongly for change. Secondly, the BJP, which fought the last Assembly election with the Indian National Lok Dal, was on its own this time. Haryana is poor consolation for the UPA considering its losses in Bihar and Jharkhand. In Jharkhand, Chief Minister Arjun Munda of the BJP was hamstrung on many counts — a poor incumbency record, raging inner party dissidence, and incompatibility problems with the JD(U). Yet thanks to the overreaching ambitions of the Congress and the JMM, and the consequent splintering of the UPA's votes, Mr. Munda today looks headed for a return. That the RJD has done rather well for itself in this State is an irony that can only compound the misery of the Congress and the JMM.

The Bihar verdict may have been a blow to the UPA but it hardly redounds to the credit of the BJP-JD(U) alliance, which could not snatch an outright victory in a State thought to have been ruined by "15 years of [RJD] misrule." That Lalu Prasad put up a spirited fight not merely against his acknowledged adversaries but also against his purported allies speaks volumes for the RJD chief's resilience as well as his ability to fight on a number of fronts. Mr. Prasad braved brickbats from all sides, the BJP, the JD(U), the Congress, and the LJP, not to mention an Election Commission that scrutinised every move of the RJD with barely concealed adversariality. Bihar is faced with a hung Assembly that at least for the moment offers no ready solution. The key to the deadlock lies with Ram Vilas Paswan who might think he has been cast in the role of kingmaker. Yet Mr. Paswan is hardly in an enviable position. His bitter campaign against Mr. Prasad renders difficult any immediate patch-up between the two campaign-trail adversaries. On the other hand, Mr. Paswan's long-term ambition to build and nurture a Muslim-Dalit constituency dictates that he stay clear of the BJP-JD(U) combine. It is perhaps owing to this predicament that the LJP leader has suggested a spell of President's Rule for the beleaguered State. Those who favour such a course to clean what they believe to be the present-day equivalent of the Aegean stables clearly do not have much faith in the power of elective democracy.

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