Why Arun Shourie still thinks a united Opposition can burst the Modi balloon in 2019
Last evening, I turned up at the Constitution Club for a book launch I was originally not planning to attend. During the panel talk at the event, Delhi chief minister Arvind kejriwal sounded skeptical about Opposition unity while Arun Shourie, the former BJP minister turned bitter critic of PM Modi, batted passionately for it.
"If you really think the country is in peril, that you personally are in peril with investigative agencies putting false cases, then you must get together. There has to be one candidate in every seat against the BJP,” said Shourie. “You don't need to fool all the people all the time to win. As the previous polls showed, you need just 31 per cent. The 69 per cent did not succeed because they were split," he added.
In India’s "first-past-the-post" (FPTP) system, the fragmentation of opposition parties can effectively ensure the domination of the strongest party. From 1952 to 1977, the Congress was able to win seats anywhere between 60 per cent and 75 per cent in Parliament and most state legislatures with just 40 per cent and 50 per cent of the total votes. The Opposition was polarised, with the Socialists, Communists, Hindutva forces all fighting separately.
Although opposition parties made an effort to unite against Indira Gandhi in 1971, it was unsuccessful with Indira at the height of her popularity. But 1977 was a watershed as the unity of the opposition parties ensured the defeat of the Congress, unbeaten till then.
It was David Butler, widely regarded as the world’s first psephologist, who pioneered the concept of "index of Opposition unity", later popularised by Prannoy Roy and Ashok Lahiri in India. The index of Opposition unity measures the overall level of Opposition unity by an index on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher the level of unity, the better the chances of victory are for the Opposition.
Although Shourie and Kejriwal might have their reasons for disagreeing on the Opposition coming together against the BJP, the varying results in 1971 and 1977 show that if there is a concrete plank on which the Opposition can unite over, even the seemingly invincible can be brought down.
If it was Emergency that brought the disparate opposition parties together in 1977, corruption (in the wake of the Bofors scandal) was the plank on which they converged in 1989 to bring down a government that had won 400-plus seats.
The Assembly elections of Bihar in 2015 and Uttar Pradesh, early this year are contrasting examples of what Opposition unity can achieve. It is another matter that this experiment in Bihar fell apart later due to internal contradictions. In Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party polled 4 per cent more votes than what the BJP got, and if you add the Congress votes, these three parties polled 10 per cent more votes than the eventual winner despite the landslide in favour of the BJP when it came to distribution of seats (325/403). So, a three-cornered contest helped the BJP to secure that kind of majority.
A robust Opposition is a very important part of any democracy, whether they are predominantly two-party systems like in the US or the UK or multi-party democracies like India. Many people today find fault with Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) for mainstreaming the Hindutva forces in 1977, despite the noble cause they united for. But Narayan was always consistent in his position on the importance of a sound Opposition right from the days after Independence. Even as early as the 1957 election, JP had tried (and failed) to get the opposition parties to avoid three- and four-cornered contests in individual constituencies. It was not because of his strident opposition to the Congress or any sympathy towards the right-wing forces that he advocated a stronger Opposition.
In a correspondence with Nehru in 1957, Narayan wrote that “he was not guided by dislike of or hostility towards the Congress, but merely by certain dispassionate principles. According to parliamentary democracy theory, it is not necessary for the Opposition to be better than the ruling party. Equally bad parties in Opposition are a check on one another and keep the democratic machine on track...”.
At a time when the Modi government has been riding roughshod over parliamentary principles, betraying autocratic impulses and even holding Parliament hostage to state elections, there is even more reason for the opposition parties to unite under an umbrella. Shourie even suggested in jest that he and former Indian ambassador to Iran and the UAE, KC Singh, (who was in the audience) could actually write a common minimum programme for this alliance in a matter of minutes.
The other day, while speaking about his recently released book, Trinamool Congress’s Derek O'Brien spoke about Opposition unity and the significance of Mamata Banerjee’s meeting with Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray.
If even an avowedly Hindutva party and traditional BJP ally like the Shiv Sena can ponder upon joining the Opposition bandwagon, it won’t be tough to get traditionally hostile parties such as the SP and the BSP and the Left and the Trinamool in a larger alliance against the threat of a second term for Narendra Modi. The slow disintegration of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu and the likely sweep of the state in 2019 by the DMK will also add strength to the opposition numbers.
The results of the forthcoming Gujarat Assembly elections will also be a pointer on what unity can achieve even if it would be the unity of social groups than political parties. But while Gujarat has been a bipolar state, it will be interesting to see if the Opposition can work out an agreement to avoid three-cornered contests in 2019 General Elections in constituencies and states where the BJP is on a strong wicket.