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വായന

03 April, 2018

Towards a truly federal polity

BRPBhaskar
Gulf Today

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has come forward to promote the idea of a united front against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance in the parliamentary elections due next year.

She is the head of the All India Trinamool Congress, which ousted the Communist Party of India (Marxist) after it wielded power in West Bengal continuously for 33 years.

Beginning life as a Congress woman, she became an MP at a young age and was a junior minister in PV Narasimha Rao’s government. She quit the party as she found it was unwilling to go the whole hog with her in the campaign against the CPI(M) and formed the Trinamool Congress. The Election Commission recently recognised it as a national party but it is essentially a regional party of Bengal, with marginal presence in neighbouring states with a significant Bengali population. 

When the BJP emerged as the largest party in the Lok Sabha in the 1990s, the Trinamool Congress, along with several other regional parties, joined the NDA and she was appointed as minister in AB Vajpayee’s government. 

In 2011, riding the anti-CPI (M) wave generated by the violent attempts to seize farm lands for industrial projects, the Trinamool Congress came to power in Bengal and she became the Chief Minister. In 2016, she won a second term.

Last week, in New Delhi, Mamata Banerjee met leaders of several parties which can possibly come together to take on the Modi juggernaut. They included National Congress Party Chief Sharad Pawar, Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut, Telangana Rashtra Samithi MP and Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao’s daughter K Kavitha and jailed Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad’s daughter and Rajya Sabha member Misa Bharti 

She also spoke to Samajwadi Party leader and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on the phone.

The Shiv Sena shares the BJP’s Hindutva ideology and is its partner in the Central and Maharashtra governments. It suspects that the BJP is trying to undermine its base and has criticised Modi on several occasions. However, it is not clear if it is ready to break the alliance with the BJP. 

Chandrasekhar Rao and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu had talked of a front that does not include the BJP and the Congress, reviving memories of the united front governments of an earlier era.

Mamata Banerjee’s meeting with Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, indicates she is thinking not in terms of the old formula of a “non-Congress non-BJP” government. She wants to end Modi’s rule and realises this calls for a joint effort by all opposition parts and the Congress has to be a part of it.

In the meeting with Sonia Gandhi, Mamta Banerjee pit forward her “one to one” formula which envisages the opposition putting up a common candidate against the BJP and its allies to prevent division of non-BJP votes. It makes sense since the BJP had won last time with a vote share of only 31 per cent. 

The national election scene presents a variegated picture. In some states –Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Karnataka are among them – the contest is essentially between the BJP and the Congress. In states like West Bengal, Orissa, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the main political force is a regional party. In Tamil Nadu, the main contenders are all regional parties. 

In Uttar Pradesh, the largest state, the BJP was able to overcome the separate challenges posed by the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party in the Lok Sabha and State Assembly elections. In the recent by-elections, the BSP and the SP put up a united front, and the BJP lost. This showed that if the opposition parties can set aside rivalries and come together they can beat the BJP.    

Mamata Banerjee has suggested that the regional parties should form a Federal Front. In her meeting with Sonia Gandhi she pleaded that where there is a dominant regional party the Congress should let it lead the fight against the BJP.

The Federal Front will appeal to the voters as a credible national alternative to the BJP only if it is able to present before them policies which are different from those of the BJP and address the needs of the poor and marginal sections.

The regional parties must gather courage and demand devolution of powers from the Centre to the states so that there is a truly federal set-up in the country. That is the surest way to safeguard the hard-won freedom and prevent the emergence of a dictatorial Centre. -- Gulf Today, Sharjah, April 3, 2018

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