AIADMK to RJD, non-NDA parties crippled by internal turmoil, lack of succession planning

Forget about a Congress mukt Bharat. If things in the major Opposition parties continue the way they are, the BJP might be looking at a non-NDA mukt Bharat! The top leadership of some of these Opposition parties and their gen-next are caught in a political vortex that threatens to push them into an existential crisis, much like it happened with Congress, a one-time pan-India entity. BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi haven’t made the decimation of these parties a political goal, the way they did with the Congress, in the hope that they could some day turn out to be allies. The assault — partly self-inflicted by the Congress — on its image, appeal and credibility has been so severe that the party is desperately battling for survival. The situation has been compounded by the fact that the aging and ailing Congress president Sonia Gandhi, barring stray appearances on critical occasions, has stepped into the shadows in the last few years, to leave the space and spotlight for her son, party vice-president and Amethi MP Rahul Gandhi, whose political track record is marked by a series of failures. So much so that even the most ardent of party workers now believe they have nothing but prayers and miracles to bank on. It has been a litany of woes for the 132-year-old party, which after two stints in power in 2004 and 2009, is staring at a crisis more severe than the one it faced in the 80s and 90s, when regional parties raided its Brahmin-SC minority votebank. The process was finally complete in 2014, when a resurgent BJP led by an aggressive Modi squeezed the life out of Congress, which drew a blank in over a dozen states and union territories, and managed just 44 Lok Sabha seats. Since then, it has lost 13 of the 16 Assembly elections. The party, which once dominated the country’s political landscape, presently rules only half a dozen states including poll-bound Karnataka, recently acquired Punjab, and a clutch of smaller states. [caption id=“attachment_3762367” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Lack of succession planning is hurting Congress today, and could hurt TMC in years to come. Representational image. PTI[/caption] Portrayed as a youth icon when he first won his parliamentary seat in 2004, Rahul is now dismissed as a leader with low credibility, little vision, poor appeal, and hardly any voter-worker-people connect, even as he awaits his anointment as party president to replace his mother, who had astounded critics by turning around the fortunes of the party when she entered active politics in 1998-99. Since Rahul has failed to rekindle hope, no one knows how and to what extent dispirited Congresswallahs will react once his elevation is formalised. And check the status of bigger states where non-NDA parties have an important role to play whether or not they are in power. Tamil Nadu, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Odisha — with 39, 40, 42, 80, 48 and 21 parliamentary seats respectively — account for 50 percent of Lok Sabha’s 543 seats. As the biggest Opposition party after Congress in Lok Sabha, AIADMK has been in turmoil after its supremo J Jayalalithaa died in December 2016, with several pretenders to the throne battling each other for dominance and supremacy. Jayalalithaa’s confidante Sasikala is in jail, her nephew Dinakaran is fighting to establish his claim on the party, Chief Minister Palaniswami and former chief minister O Panneerselvan, Jayalalithaa’s neice Deepa Jayakumar, and a host of other aspirants have all thrown their hats in the ring as her successor, each trying to undercut the other. The tussle is likely to increase and ebb in the coming days in the state, where Jayalalithaa’s leadership had fetched it 37 out of 39 Lok Sabha seats. This situation has made it a veritable hunting ground for the BJP, as it strives to build its presence there in the resultant confusion. Indeed, what is happening in Tamil Nadu in Jayalalithaa’s absence would be a big lesson for one-man/one-woman parties like Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal or Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party, where the outfit’s fate is inextricably tied to its charismatic leader: Great when the going is good, catastrophic when it is not. As the third largest party with 34 Lok Sabha MPs in 2014, Trinamool Congress has its own demons to fight in West Bengal. Mamata and her party may have tided over the crises brought about by the Saradha, Rose Valley chit fund and other scams, but as the list of her party leaders getting implicated in these exposes gets longer, there is no knowing how the electorate will react to them in the 2019 general elections. She has been grooming her nephew Abhishek to keep the family’s grip on the party she has single-handedly nurtured, but a big question mark hangs over his leadership quality. Like other outfits built around one larger than life image, Trinamool Congress does not have the cushion of additional leadership in case of exigencies, leaving it open to the risk of dissipation, fragmentation and disappearance. Not that having, creating or building such a cushion is always successful. Take the case of Lalu Yadav’s RJD in Bihar, Sharad Pawar’s NCP, the Thackerays’ Shiv Sena and its splinter group MNS in Maharashtra, or Mulayam Singh’s Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh. Lalu’s daughter is a Rajya Sabha member while his two sons are ministers in Nitish Kumar’s Cabinet in Bihar, which has 40 Lok Sabha seats. The 70-year-old Lalu installed them in ministerial positions with age on their side, to help them gain experience and political skill. But instead, they are being made to expend their time and energy in dealing with tax authorities in cases that are likely to drag on, much like their father was battling for several years with the fodder scam. There are already reports of strains in the grand alliance between JDU and RJD on issues ranging from demonetisation to the upcoming presidential elections, which could lead to a realignment of forces in the state. Sharad Pawar, 77, is mentoring his daughter and Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule, but his nephew Ajit Pawar and the rest of the party leadership are unlikely to watch from the sidelines if he anoints her as his successor in NCP whose national role is defined by its presence in Maharashtra. The battle of succession in the Shiv Sena began even before Bal Thackeray’s demise, with the anointment of his son Uddhav as his heir and the emergence of a splinter group under Raj Thackeray. The split sapped the party of its energy in the state where BJP once played second fiddle, but now leads the alliance. In Uttar Pradesh, the war in the Yadav family bled the camps arraigned behind SP supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav and his son and former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, and there is little sign of a let-up. BSP, also under one leader Mayawati, is also floundering politically. Unlike her mentor Kanshi Ram who groomed her for the leadership position to keep the Dalit party going, Mayawati has shown — deliberately or otherwise — no such acumen or foresight. The crisis faced by the two UP parties is underlined by the fact that in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, BSP drew a blank, SP got five (all for the Yadav clan), and the Congress two (just Sonia and Rahul), while BJP secured 72 out of 80 seats. The story was repeated in the 2017 Assembly elections, with BSP managing 19, SP 48, Congress seven, and BJP romping home with 311 out of 403 legislative seats. BJD’s story in Odisha is unlikely to be any different from BSP’s or AIADMK’s. Chief minister Naveen Patnaik has not groomed a second rung leadership for the party that stormed the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in the state. Sensing space for an alternative, BJP has been trying to increase its footprint here as in other parts where it hasn’t been a factor before the Modi era. Four other key states — Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh — have 91 parliamentary seats between them, but are all BJP ruled, with the main opposition party Congress showing little signs of a fightback notwithstanding the acts of omission and commission of the ruling party. BJP is already eyeing Congress-ruled Karnataka which goes for state elections in 2018, a year before it votes for a new set of 28 MPs. The other big state in the neighbourhood, Andhra Pradesh, is led by NDA ally Telugu Desam, and will hold elections in 2019 for 42 MPs and 175 MLAs. The absence of a fallback leadership in some non-NDA parties and evidence of an open or incipient turmoil in some others increases the possibility of an Opposition-mukt country in 2019 unless these parties wake up to the dangers that lies before them.