The anti-BJP front has reportedly agreed on a seat-sharing arrangement for the coming Bihar Assembly poll. Announced last week, it gives the two big parties, the JD(U) and the RJD, a hundred seats each while leaving 40 for the Congress and three for the NCP. The announcement has, predictably, caused public recriminations. The first to protest was Tariq Anwar, the lone Lok Sabha member of the NCP from Bihar, who threatened to walk out of the alliance if the party’s ‘honour and status’ were not restored. Anwar was blunt in accusing Messrs Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav of taking the minorities for granted. He said that the JD(U)-RJD seemed to believe that merely because they claimed to be fighting the BJP, Muslims could be trusted to vote for them. It was Anwar’s case that without him representing the Muslim face of the alliance, the so-called secular front could not really claim to be secular. Strange logic, but that is what Indian secularism was reduced to by its political practitioners. This was not all.
Another secular warrior was no less angry. Mulayam Singh Yadav remonstrated that the Samajwadi Party was completely left out of the seat-sharing deal between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav. The SP too laid claim to at least a dozen or so seats. But the unspoken question that none of these leaders asked was the grant of as many as 40 seats to the Congress. Unless there is a secret understanding between Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar that at least half of the Congress seats would actually go to the former, it was hard to justify the Congress being given so many seats. The Congress does not have the electoral wherewithal for contesting these many seats. It was fortunate to have won five seats in the outgoing Assembly thanks only to the split in the votes of major parties in these constituencies. Speculation of a secret deal whereby the RJD would get a half or more of the seats allocated for the Congress cannot be dismissed out of hand, especially following a top leader of the party claiming that it was entitled to more seats than the JD(U) since it had yielded the CM’s post to the latter.
In other words, the seat-sharing agreement announced rather early by the anti-BJP front was still not a settled issue. Given the marriage of convenience between Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav, and the ambitions of many other smaller players, a catfight over seats between rival claimants is likely to persist till the eleventh hour. And those who fail to make the grade, are likely to gravitate to the rival alliance or even contest as Independents. This is Bihar, after all. Here politics is a major vocation. There are other signs of discordance in the alliance. A senior RJD leader has publicly complained about the lack of photographs of Lalu Yadav in the election posters of the JD(U). If Nitish and Lalu Yadav are contesting the poll in alliance, it stands to reason, the RJD leader argued, that the publicity material too carry their images. Nitish cannot plaster Bihar with his own visage all over the State and leave Lalu Yadav to fend for himself.
In fact, till a few days ago, Nitish avoided meeting Yadav publicly, choosing to visit him sans any publicity. His anxiety might stem from the fact that Bihar had in the previous elections brought into his theme that Lalu Yadav represented the dark forces responsible for inflicting `jungle raj’ on the State. His reluctance to be seen sharing the same public space reflects an attempt to distance himself from the main dispenser of the same jungle raj while relying on him to help him retain the CM’s `gaddi’ in the face of a concerted challenge by the BJP. Also, Nitish Kumar might fear that the socio-economic and caste incompatibilities and contradictions between his traditional support base and that of his foe-turned-friend might not lend itself to a simple aggregation of the votes of the JD(U) and RJD. In electoral terms, two plus two can often turn out to be three or minus two. For, all those who had voted for Nitish when he was in alliance with the BJP and viscerally against Lalu Yadav might not stomach the idea of voting for him now that he has decided to sup with the devil incarnate as it were. Therefore, there can be no finality to the seat-sharing deal until the last minute.
