Major regional players down the south-eastern coast, considered neutral or pro-BJP while not being allied, have kept their distance from the action group. Their participation in the future, active or passive, will be determined by how the BJP handles them. Consider, on the west coast, BJP’s former ally in Maharashtra, Shiv Sena, which was represented by Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Friday. The Sena broke up with the BJP after winning a majority to form the government because it wanted to share the CM’s office. It unseated the frenemy by having a tripartite arrangement with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party. And now, the Sena is expected to carry forward the arrangement till 2024 and even beyond. Will it or will it not? The question will pop up much later. For now, the Sena has joined the anti-BJP forces at national level.

It is said that Rahul Gandhi, who was seen in a new avatar in the recent Parliamentary session, worked hard on the Sena. Rahul’s bonhomie is seen as an assurance for the Maha Vikas Aghadi government’s unaffected run despite his reluctance to collaborate with the Sena in 2019. Two years later, senior Congressmen believe that the Congress-Shiv Sena pact, in case the Sharad Pawar-led NCP gets lured away, could work even better in Maharashtra’s electoral politics. But they say the bond would work only when the Sena closes all roads leading to the BJP. The Sena insiders say that the induction of Narayan Rane in the Union cabinet has increased manifold the party leadership’s bitterness for the BJP’s high command.

Poll

Who will win the Punjab Elections?

BJP 32.79%

AAP 42.62%

INC 24.59%

Submit

View All In Poll

Unlike the Sena, some other former NDA partners seem to have some reservations over pledging support, perhaps because their participation could be detrimental to their regional interests. The united opposition’s picture will be fairly clear after the next year’s Assembly elections in UP, Punjab, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur and Goa. A year later, nine states will have Assembly elections. It will be followed by the Lok Sabha elections in the summer of 2024, the year which will also have seven state elections split between the summer and winter. So, the 16 states going to polls in 2022 and 2023 will be key to the opposition’s 2024 campaign against the BJP, which will be working on dismantling the unity of the opposition. Apart from the ruling party they are up in arms against, the opposition will be faced with the past experiences of such complex formations and the learning from the JP experiment which succeeded but did not last long. To achieve success — we can’t predict its size at this stage — the opposition will need honesty from the participants to make the people believe that “we are the alternative that you must vote for”. In her address on Friday, Sonia Gandhi gave a sense of reality in a virtual meeting, when she said, “This is a challenge, but together we can and must rise to it because there is simply no alternative to working cohesively together.”

Dharmendra Jore is political editor, mid-day. He tweets@dharmendrajore
Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com