Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 17: The Congress party’s rout in election after election to various state Assemblies has strengthened the voice of the critics of the Grand Old Party for a change of leadership in the opposition INDIA bloc.
The party’s total decimation in the just-concluded Bihar Assembly elections has further triggered the murmurs within the opposition bloc for a change with some leaders of the Samajwadi Party wanting the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to hand over the baton to the SP president Akhilesh Yadav, while some others are preferring the West Bengal chief minister and chief of the Trinamool Congress Mamata Banerjee, a die-hard critic of the BJP, to take over the mantle.
A Samajwadi Party MLA has said the party’s chief and Kannauj MP Akhilesh Yadav should lead the Opposition alliance and claimed that the Samajwadi Party was capable of forming a government on its own in Uttar Pradesh, politically one of the most significant states in the country.
The Congress, which won 99 seats in the Lok Sabha polls last year, has performed poorly in the state polls held since. BJP and its allies won six of the eight Assembly polls held last year, including the crucial elections in Haryana and Maharashtra. In the two other states going to the polls in the next few months, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the Congress has little or zero presence.
The Samajwadi Party, which won 37 Lok Sabha seats in the general election last year, is the second-largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha after the Congress. Ravidas Mehrotra, MLA from Lucknow Central, has said the INDIA alliance would have formed the government in Bihar if the ballot method had been used for conducting the election. Akhilesh Yadav has repeatedly pushed for a return to ballot voting and questioned the Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) system, apparently hinting that the Congress has not pushed the demand hard enough to compel the Election Commission of India (ECI) for the change.
“Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav should lead the India Alliance. Samajwadi Party is capable of forming a government on its own in Uttar Pradesh,” he said.
The remarks are significant against the backdrop of the Congress’s rout in the Bihar election. The country’s main opposition, which won 19 seats in the 2020 polls, managed to win just six this time. This, despite Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, and the party’s other top leaders holding several rallies ahead of the polls. The Congress’s ally, RJD, won 25 seats — 50 less than its 2020 score. The NDA posted a massive win in Bihar, winning 202 seats in the 243-member Assembly.
Earlier, Trinamool Congress MP Kalyan Banerjee had suggested that Ms Banerjee should lead the INDIA bloc. “In the INDIA alliance, who is the leader? Nobody has been chosen as a leader, as a face of the opposition. Now it has to be done. The Congress has failed; that is established. Congress leaders tried in Haryana, but they failed. In Maharashtra, they failed. We reposed our faith in Congress, but it could not achieve the result,” Banerjee had said.
The Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) patriarch and veteran politician Lalu Prasad Yadav too had earlier batted for the Trinamool chief as the INDIA bloc head. Asked about the reservation among the Congress leaders to accept Banerjee as the INDIA leader, the RJD founder had said last year, “The Congress’s opposition will not make any difference…She should be allowed to lead the INDIA bloc.” The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and another veteran politician Sharad Pawar also had given a tacit approval to the demand for the West Bengal chief to lead the INDIA bloc.
More than Tamil Nadu, INDIA Bloc’s unity will come for an acid test in West Bengal where the TMC ruled supreme and unlikely to agree to share any seat with the Congress except at its own terms, while another member of the INDIA bloc, the Communist Party of India (Marxists), a strong rival of the TMC, would not agree to join hands with Ms Banerjee’s party to provide an united face against the BJP which is pushing hard to capture power in the eastern state where it had so far failed to capture power.
