All the president’s men & women of opposition

India’s political opposition seems to have finally realised that there is no stopping Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election juggernaut. Immediately after Modi’s latest election victories in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, etc., Omar Abdullah of Jammu and Kashmir’s National Conference had tweeted that the opposition better start preparing for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections because the 2019 polls were already a foregone conclusion.Although there was some discussion about Abdullah’s tweet at the time, nobody seemed to take him seriously. Just a few weeks earlier, chief ministers of West Bengal and Delhi, Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal respectively, had even threatened Modi with dire consequences in the wake of demonetisation of high value currency.But Abdullah apparently saw it coming earlier than others. Uttar Pradesh seems to have set things in the right perspective for the opposition and if any further confirmation was required, it came in the form of the municipal elections in the national capital. Although it is not even a full state and these were just civic polls, there was so much national attention on the Delhi elections that it was nothing short of a contest for assembly or even parliament. Delhi, naturally, is a microcosm of India with people from every state in the country making it their home, so a victory here, that too in such unequivocal manner, can only be construed as the general trend for all India.Except for Punjab and Himachal Pradesh all north Indian states are either directly under the BJP now or the party is sharing power with a local outfit as in the case of Jammu and Kashmir. With all that is happening within the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, an election for the state assembly could happen well before the scheduled date in 2020. Himachal Pradesh will see elections towards the fag end of this year. In both Delhi and Himachal the BJP is primed for victory if current trends are anything to go by.While West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha are still holding strong against the BJP electoral machine, north-east India is slowly veering towards the saffron party thanks to some deft politicking by BJP president Amit Shah. In the west, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra have been BJP strongholds for years now. It is only south India, as a region, that has kept the BJP at bay although it had tasted power in Karnataka before and is getting set to mount a challenge to the ruling Congress Party there in elections due next year. In Kerala it opened its account with a single seat in last year’s elections, the ruling Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh is an ally of the BJP at the Centre while the ruling Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in Tamil Nadu and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti in the newly-formed Telangana are favourably disposed towards the BJP.In short there is little that the opposition can do to hurt Modi in his present state of invincibility. But oppose it must if only for the simple reason that is one way of staying relevant in the current political scenario. The case of the Left parties, especially the Marxists, is one such. Their dated ideology has fewer and fewer takers as each day passes and even in the two states that they are in power – Kerala and Tripura – life is turning out to be extremely difficult for the communists.The 2019 Lok Sabha polls are still some way away but a combined assault on Modi cannot wait that long because he will get stronger with each state assembly election leading up to that date. The presidential election in July has thrown up a rare opportunity and everyone who is someone in the opposition is busy cobbling a united front candidate to oppose whoever Modi is thinking of projecting. So you find leaders like Sitaram Yechuri flying around the country meeting chief ministers and party bosses in an attempt to bring consensus. Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi is also in the thick of working towards a common candidate.In attempting to field a consensus candidate, the opposition, or at least sections of it, must be hoping to take the unity forward to 2019. But apart from their common enmity towards the BJP there is nothing that binds these disparate outfits. An enemy’s enemy could be a friend in a short-lived battle (read presidential poll) but a war (Lok Sabha elections) is often a prolonged affair that calls for more than just ad hoc arrangements. Moreover, a presidential poll is something of an internal arrangement among politicians whereas elections to the Lok Sabha are played out in the people’s court. Even in the presidential poll these parties are facing a few problems, the most important of them being the numbers which are stacked in favour of Modi. With the massive victory in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP and the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) have nearly 553,000 of the 1.1mn electoral college votes. That’s almost unassailable because the opposition now has the onerous task of getting every party on board because if one slips out, the NDA will get past the post.The AIADMK, which has 18,000 votes, is almost certain to vote with the NDA since it needs the federal government’s support in the face of the internal squabbles that do not show any sign of immediate resolution. Both the Palaniswami and Paneerselvam factions know that Modi is crucial to their party’s continued stay in power and both are also equally, albeit surreptitiously in the case of Palaniswami, thankful to Modi for helping the party get rid of Sasikala and her nephew Dinakaran. Anyway, there is no question of the AIADMK joining hands with arch-rival DMK who is an ally of the Congress-led opposition.Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is being wooed to vote with the opposition but he reportedly told Yechuri that he would not want to make any promises at this point in time. There is speculation that Odisha’s Draupadi Murmu, currently governor of Jharkhand, could be a possible NDA candidate in which case Patnaik will have no choice but to support her candidature.West Bengal’s Banerjee has not revealed her hand yet but one thing she would not want to be seen doing is engaging the Marxists on any forum or front though Modi seems to be her Enemy No 1 at the moment. But with Banerjee there is no predicting what her next move will be.Modi though got an unexpected gift from none other than the Congress Party’s senior leader Digvijay Singh who, out of the blue, charged the Telangana government of radicalising Muslim youth. Singh said in a tweet that the Telangana police had set up a bogus website in the name of IS in the hope of trapping young Muslims who are inclined to radical ideas. Not only did the state police file a criminal complaint against Singh, but Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao declared that his party would not support the Congress in the presidential election. It was just over a month ago that Singh had ‘inadvertently’ helped the BJP form the government in Goa. With ‘enemies’ like this who needs friends?Numbers are only one side of the equation. Neither side has yet revealed who their respective candidates would be. The names of Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj are coming out of the NDA camp while those of Sharad Pawar and Sharad Yadav are being mentioned in the opposition stables. All the opposition efforts at forging unity could come to naught if Modi decides to spring a surprise by projecting an apolitical choice, say a scientist or an economist or even an artist. After all, it was the NDA under Atal Behari Vajpayee that nominated A P J Abdul Kalam for president. As usual, the Left parties opposed him but Kalam won by a mile and even had the Congress Party supporting him. This could even happen if Modi decides to go with incumbent Pranab Mukherjee once again – Mamata will have no option but to support her fellow-Bengali while the Congress, too, will have to fall in line because he was their choice in the first place – although it is doubtful as the government is already preparing Mukherjee’s post-retirement home in the capital.