April 6, 1998

Chandrababu Naidu has merely emulated V P Singh.

Swapan Dasgupta

When a formation loses 76 seats and suffers a 7.7 per cent erosion in votes, the political seismograph is bound to record a tremor. What happened to the United Front (UF) last week came as no real surprise except to those blinded into believing that the 14-party combination was also an impregnable social alliance. It was, of course, no such thing. The UF came into being in May 1996 with a one-point programme of keeping the BJP out of government. Apart from the Left and the Samajwadi Party, which have clear ideological positions, the rest of the pack was guided by two considerations: electoral arithmetic and power.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) did not join the UF in 1996 because of some principled commitment to so-called secular values. They opposed the BJP because the saffron forces were relatively insignificant in Andhra Pradesh and Assam and could not offset the incremental value of Left and Muslim votes. Plus, the numbers game argued against Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the 11th Lok Sabha.

This time it is different for two reasons. First, the BJP and its pre-poll allies are only a whisker away from an outright majority and are only too willing to accommodate late entrants. Second, the experience of the Biju Janata Dal, Lok Shakti, Samata Party and Trinamool Congress -- the first three are offshoots of the Janata Dal -- clearly proves that aligning with the BJP is not an electoral liability. Even in Tamil Nadu, a state hitherto regarded as a no-go area for the BJP, the AIADMK combine actually benefited from Vajpayee's image. The 1998 election has conclusively demonstrated that not only does the BJP occupy an autonomous space, it is the most decisive anti-Congress force. More to the point, this role is relatively uncluttered by the fault lines of secularism and communalism.

The last factor is crucial in forging new alignments. In the Bihar assembly election of 1995, the Samata Party did not ally with the BJP on the belief that such an association would alienate the Muslims. Both fought the election separately and the division of votes contributed to Laloo Yadav's victory. In 1996, Samata overcame its inhibitions and the BJP-Samata alliance won 24 of the 54 seats. This time, the same alliance secured 28 seats. According to the India Today-CSDS post-poll survey conducted by Yogendra Yadav, the alliance secured 42.5 per cent of the Backward Caste vote, as against 28 per cent secured by the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Likewise, conventional wisdom deemed that Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress would be routed for its ties with the BJP. After all, Muslims account for 22 per cent of West Bengal's population. The results proved otherwise. Indeed, the post-poll survey indicated that 18.4 per cent of Muslims voted for the Trinamool-BJP alliance, whereas only 2.3 per cent had voted for the BJP in 1996.

Actually, statistics tell the whole story. Alignments and realignments are not shaped by the subjective preferences of those intellectuals who agonised over the AGP and TDP's flip-flop. If the BJP hadn't polled 18.3 per cent in Andhra Pradesh and 23.9 per cent in Assam (pushing the AGP to third place), N. Chandrababu Naidu and Prafulla Mahanta wouldn't have had a change of heart. Democratic politics does not rest on contrived hysteria and turning communities into cannon fodder. Secularism is an article of faith, but its political use is eminently negotiable. Ask V.P. Singh about 1989. Ask I.K. Gujral about Jalandhar. Power is the great leveller.

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