Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Sept 7: A friend till yesterday, the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has launched an intensive effort to unite all the opposition parties on one platform against the BJP to throw a challenge to the prime minister Narendra Modi in the 2024 Parliamentary elections.
Kumar, who severed his ties with the BJP last month to form the “Mahagathbandhan” ministry in Bihar jointly with the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress, met Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar on Wednesday on his mission to unite the opposition parties. The chief of Janata Dal United has been in the national capital since Monday with a long list of leaders he wanted to meet.
“We will build a main front, not a Third Front,” Kumar reiterated during an interaction with reporters in the evening after meeting Pawar. Declaring that his talks with Opposition leaders will be positive, Kumar, who never shared a cordial relation with Modi despite being an alliance partner of the BJP, said the 2024 general elections will be “very good.” “It has been a one-sided contest so far.”
Kumar reiterated that he was not in the race to become the prime minister. “I will not be the leader, I will try to unite (the Opposition). The BJP is trying to capture the country. If everyone fights the elections together, then the picture will be different, we are talking to all the people,” he said.
Though his is not the first attempt to unite the opposition under one umbrella against the BJP, Kumar’s efforts rings more sincerity and might make the task easier for other opposition parties because of his repeated assertion that he was not the prime ministerial candidate. The efforts earlier by the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, her Telangana counterpart K Chandrasekhar Rao and other non-BJP leaders had run into rough weather because of their aversions for the Congress party.
Though most of the opposition parties agree that a united front minus the Congress would not be feasible, many of the opposition leaders including the Aam Aadmi Party chairman and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal are unwilling to take the Congress on board because of their conflicting interests at the regional levels.
State-level rivalries had dominated keeping apart parties like the Congress, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP, Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party and the Left — despite much effort from Sharad Pawar and Ms Banerjee. Kumar, however, has an advantage to that he already is working with the Congress along with the RJD in the “Mahagathbandhan” in his home state.
The answer for other common bottlenecks for an united front like the projection of the prime ministerial candidate or a common minimum programme have been provided by the CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury if it was acceptable to other non-BJP parties. “Such decision can be taken after the elections,” Yechury said after his meeting with Kumar which he described as “home coming.” Pointing to the various alliances formed over the last three decades, he said even the UPA and the NDA coalitions took shape after the elections.
About a Common Minimum Programme, he said it can also be formed after the government formation. “It will happen. First, the BJP has to be separated from holding the reins of the power. Parties are doing it and they will do it together subsequently,” Yechury had said, “The basic point is that the issues are for the people and not the leaders. What’s (Congress’s) Bharat Jodo Yatra about? What’s the AAP’s Make India Number One campaign about? To unify the country against the destruction of the Constitution. These issues cement the unity,” he had added.
After Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and Janata Dal Secular’s HD Kumaraswamy, Kumar had met Yechury, CPI’s D Raja, Indian National Lok Dal’s Om Prakash Chautala and Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav. On Thursday morning he also met CPIML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, who is also an ally in his state. Sources said Kumar’s plan for now is impressing on the opposition the need to put up a united front against the BJP. This is essential in view of the lack of cohesiveness that the opposition had displayed ahead of the elections in 2019.