After the spectacular win in the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections, Mamata Banerjee is now eyeing to capture the Delhi throne. To fulfill her dream, she has already appealed all opposition political parties to form an alliance. At present in Delhi, the West Bengal Chief Minister is interacting with leaders of like-minded political parties to formulate an effective strategy to defeat BJP in the 2024 general elections. But will she be able to bring together a divided opposition? Though it is not possible to predict the outcome of the election to be held in two and a half years, the chances of opposition parties putting up a united front against BJP in the 2024 general election appears bleak at present.
As a matter of fact, the call for unity of the opposition has become a fashion in present day Indian politics. Every so often, especially after electoral success of any opposition party, issuance of such a call has become mandatory. Quite interestingly even before the 2019 general elections, a similar call was issued. At that time too, Mamata Banerjee took the lead and held a rally in the presence of opposition leaders. The outcome of such a move is now open for everyone to see as BJP roared back to power with more seats. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s party also performed poorly, losing 18 out of 42 seats to BJP.
It appears that opposition leaders have not yet learnt from past events. After BJP tasted defeat in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, the opposition parties have once again become vocal. But the most interesting part of the entire exercise is that while each party talks about unity of opposition, in reality it does just the opposite. Back in 2018, Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao initiated the unity move but not a single party came forward to join hands. Due to the lack of unity among the opposition parties, so far all such calls including the one issued by Mamata before the last general elections found no takers.
After a gap of two and a half years, talks of uniting the opposition is once again dominating the country’s political scene. History shows that in 1977, the Congress was defeated when all opposition parties merged together and formed Janata Party under the guidance of Jay Prakash Narayan. Once again in 1989, Congress lost the elections when the opposition parties managed to put up united candidates against the ruling party in all parliamentary constituencies. But such experiments were short-lived. India has seen coalition rule in real terms in between 1991 to 2014. The main reason behind the advent of the coalition era was the fall of the Congress in the popularity graph. But the present situation is different as BJP has perhaps emerged as the strongest national party after Independence. Thus before initiating any move towards unity, regional leaders should first ask themselves whether the Indian electorate would support such a hotchpotch coalition in place of a formidable national party like BJP in the general elections. For India to have a change in government or even a strong opposition, alliances must be forged.