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No two elections are alike. In the very nature of things they
can't be. Situations change. The political scenario does not
remain the same. Fresh parties come into being. New alignments
take place. As they say about a river that one can't put one's
finger in the same river twice, so it can be said about politics
that no prognostication about-election results can be repeated.
Ground realities change.
Right now hectic confabulations are taking place among current
parties on how to fight the elections and statements are made one
day and contradicted the next. Mamata Banerjee, for example, was
one day claiming that she would have nothing to do with Sitaram
Kesri's Congress; the next day she calls on Sonia Gandhi in Delhi
and her tune changes. The day after she is back in Calcutta and
reverts to her earlier position. Where does she stand? Her claim
is that it is she who represents the Congress in West Bengal and
not Pranab Mukherjee. She has a point there. But many issues are
left hanging, in all probability intentionally. But there is no
doubt that she is a force in the state. But what is the Congress
position on the all-India level? In west Bengal Congress is a
broken reed. In next door Bihar Sitaram Kesri, the secularist,
has made peace with Laloo Prasad Yadav, the pure casteist.
Laloo Prasad wants to hammer out a "secular front whatever that
means. And towards that end he has struck a deal with a fellow -
an unrepentant - casteist, Kanshi Ram, who, however, claims that
in Uttar Pradesh his party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, will go it
alone. For a while there was talk of the Congress teaming up with
Mulayam Singh Yadav's Samajwadi Party, at least in Uttar Pradesh.
That has now been denied. Denials in politics have just no
meaning. Honesty in politics, is clearly not the best policy.
Opportunism is, as Kanshi Ram will be the first to tell you.
During election time principles are the first casualty. Survival
is everything. It will take some time for the smoke over the
battle field to clear. Meanwhile, the only party that seems to
know its mind and is clear about is objective is the BJP. What
are its chances?
In mid-November, a poll conducted by the Cochin-based Week
magazine in conjunction with MODE indicated that if elections
were held immediately, the BJP will get 46 per cent of the
popular vote. The Week-MODE poll however was conducted only in
India's metropolitan cities and is not necessarily indicative of
the nation-wide trend. But taken at its face value it shows a
remarkable swing of popular sentiment towards the BJP.
In 1952 Congress, under Jawaharlal Nehru, won 45 per cent of the
popular vote to bag 384 Lok Sabha seats. In 1957 Congress won 48
per cent of the votes but won only 371 seats. In 1962 Congress
won 45 per cent of the votes to get 361 seats.
Congress under Indira Gandhi won 41 per cent of the votes in 1967
to get 283 seats. In 1971 it won 44 per cent of the votes to get
352 seats. In 1980 again it won 43 per cent of the votes to get
353 seats. The largest number of seats over won by Congress was
under Rajiv Gandhi when in 1984 the party got 48 per cent of the
votes to bag 415 seats. But this was following the assassination
of Indira Gandhi; Rajiv was beneficiary of the sympathy vote just
as it was India's victory in the Pakistan war in 1971 that got
Indira Gandhi 352 seats. They were extraordinary circumstances.
The point is that if the Week-MODE poll is applicable on a
national scale, the 46 percent vote in favour of the BJP should
net it anything 365 to 400 seats in the 1998 elections. But is
that a possibility? The general consensus is that the BJP will
improve upon its 1996 performance but will not necessarily get a
majority on its own or even with its allies such as the Shiromani
Akali Dal and the Samata Party. In the BJP camp, however, the
mood is definitely upbeat. L. K. Advani believes that a BJP -
wave is on its way and will sweep everything before it. It is
not impossible. So seasoned a politician as Ramakrishna Hegde is
now coming to understand the BJP better. In a recent interview to
a national newspaper Hegde conceded that the BJP has "quality
leadership and persons with exceptional abilities". Nobody, he
said, can question their loyalty to the country. Besides, he
went on, BJP is "on its best behaviour when in power" and he
cited some of his Muslim colleagues in Maharashtra as saying that
Muslims have had "no problems with the BJP-Shiv Sena government".
And he added: "Today BJP is the only party which has already
projected its Prime Ministerial candidate. The Congress has not
done so and the United Front is not capable of selecting its
leader even after elections". According to him, no party will get
a majority but the BJP will emerge as the single largest party
with its allies. The Congress will get "around 50 seats unless
there are some dramatic changes and new dynamism is injected"
into the party.
New dynamism? What dynamism can one expect in a moribund party
that even now is crying aloud for Sonia Gandhi to assume its
leadership and fight its election battle? There is not one single
leader in the Congress who can be called a national leader
capable of rousing enthusiastic support for the party. Sitaram
Kesri himself, Sharad Pawar, Karunakaran, Tiwari, Arjun Singh and
others are all regional leaders, if even that. Atal Bihari
Vajpayee and L. K. Advani stand head and shoulder above them.
Kesri and company are pygmies when compared to the BJP leaders.
The Janata Dal, largest of the motley group that formed the
kichdi United Front government is now at sixes and sevens within
itself. It has broken up in Bihar with Laloo Prasad Yadav
forming his own Rashtriya Janata Dal. What is amusing is that on
the one hand Laloo has come to terms with Kesri while on the
other he is teaming up with Kanshi Ram. He is thus juggling with
two balls simultaneously. In Orissa, die Janata Dal has split
with Navneet Patnaik, son of the legendary Biju Patnaik forming
his own group and taking away the majority of M]Ps with him. In
the Orissa Assembly, Navneet Patnaik has secured the support of
29 out of the 43 sitting Dal MLAs. That leaves the Orissa Janata
Dal clueless and leaderless. It is well to remember that in
Bihar, Jagannath Mishra has broken up with the Congress and is
all set to launch a new party. That means he is taking away the
upper caste, especially brahmin, vote from Congress. Mishra wants
to strengthen the Congress culture and its traditions independent
of Sitaram Kesri which is another way of saying that Mishra wants
to be in a position to dictate terms to Kesri on their home
ground Bihar.
If Congress thinks it can at least get its way in Gujarat with
the support of Shankarsinh Vaghela, it is going to be in for a
surprise. Differences in the ruling Rashtriya Janata Party have
surfaced over the issue of dissolution of the State Assembly and
holding simultaneous polls for both the Lok Sabha and Assembly.
Also on the issue of disciplining senior Minister Atmaram Patel,
Chief Minister Dilip Parekh and BJP chief Vaghela are, at
loggerheads. The Congress can only sit back and watch. No doubt
the BJP will take advantage of this new development. In Tamil
Nadu, needless to say, following the Jain Committee report on
which the Congress cashed in enough to demand the resignations of
the DMK Ministers in the United Front government, Congress
fortunes have dipped steeply. The DMK will continue its alliance
with the Tamil Maanila Congress and that is that. Kesri is left
high and dry. He has even lost the support of AIADMK's
Jayalalitha who has turned to the BJP in a major turnaround. The
BJP, according to Jayalalitha, is better placed than the Congress
to provide a stable government at the Centre. Congress failure to
get AIADMK's support has so angered Mani Shankar Aiyar that he
has decided to stay out of the Congress as long as Kesri is its
president! To add to Congress misery, a former Andhra Pradesh
Chief Minister, N. Bhaskar Rao, too has resigned from the party
maintaining that it is a "dead party". So much for Congress
chances. The situation is just as bad for it in Kerala. Ever
since the last general elections, the Indian Union Muslim League,
a partner in the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) has
sought to keep its distance from the Congress. In the last
elections the UDF and the Left Democratic Front (LDF) won ten
seats each, with the Congress in the UDF getting seven seats to
the Muslim League's two. But the BJP is now on its way to
capture at least a couple of seats from the Congress.
The tremendous popularity of L. K. Advani noticed in the huge
crowds that he attracted during his Swam Jayanti Rath Yatra
earlier in the year has not gone unnoticed and has sent jitters
down Congress spine. In the south, as in West Bengal, the BJP
popularity curve has been making an upward move. That much was
even admitted by, CPM leader Jyoti Basu in a recent address to
his party workers. Intellectuals may sneer at Hindutva. but that
seems to have caught popular imagination. But the card that the
BJP will play is the Stability Card and not the Hindutva one.
Ask anyone in the street; the least that everyone wants is
stability. Can the seam-ridden Congress provide stability?
Everyone knows that it can't. But then can the United Front on
its own? That it can't do either, and that is clear as crystal.
Can a minority United Front government again form a government
with 'outside support' from the Congress? Who will trust Congress
after what it has done in past years, to pull the rug from under
the feet of Chowdhury Charan Singh, Chandrashekar and Deve Gowda?
Will United Front? Really? So, whatever the United Front leaders
may presently say, once the election results are out, the
constituent parties must ask themselves whether they want to
trust the Congress or go with the BJP. For them the answer must
be clear: the BJP is the more dependable and principled. Didn't
it put up with the BSP and its allies get a majority or not, in
the end it has to be a BJP-led government that will have to come
to power at the Centre. It is not a coincidence that almost
overnight nobody is calling the BJP communal. The truth is
dawning slowly on everybody that the time for change is at hand
and that it will be the BJP that will lead the country into the
twenty first century - and to glory.
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