A vote for electoral alliances

The party’s defeat in Gauriganj is bad news for Sonia Gandhi and is expected to spur on a Congress alliance with the Samajwadi Party. Sonia had turned down a tie-up with the SP before the bypolls — the deal on offer was that the Congress should back the SP in Haidergarh and take its help in Gauriganj — because she didn’t want to give the impression that she’d gone in for an alliance to save her own constituency.

These two bypolls in UP are a major setback for both the mainstream parties. The BJP and the Congress find themselves pushed to the third and fourth position respectively in the country’s largest state. The national parties will now play second fiddle to the regional outfits, the BJP to the BSP and the Congress to the Samajwadi Party, if and when that alliance is sewn up.

It is Mayawati, who wrested the Gauriganj seat from the Congress, whereas it is the BJP which had come second last time. It is the SP which won in Haidergarh, and the BSP which has come second. The BJP, which had won this seat in 1998 when the then CM Rajnath Singh was elected from here, finds itself relegated to the number three position. The fight in UP is going to be between Mulayam and Mayawati, and the bypolls have only underlined it.

The signal from Sathankulam in Tamil Nadu is no different. The Congress had never lost from here even in the worst of times, and now the AIADMK has dealt it a body blow. The Congress can retain its relevance in Tamil Nadu by aligning with one or the other dravidian party. There was a covert understanding between the Congress and the DMK here, and M.K. Stalin, M. Karunanidhi’s younger son, had visited the constituency. Though he did not actively campaign for the Congress, he urged people not to vote for the ruling ADMK.

For sometime now, the Congress has had its channels open to the DMK. Murasoli Maran, before he took ill, was one of those through whom the two parties were in touch. The Congress is naturally worried about the indictment of the DMK by the Jain Commission in Rajiv Gandhi’s assasination, but Sathankulam has prepared the ground for an overt Congress-DMK alliance in Tamil Nadu for the 2004 Lok Sabha polls.

The message of the NCP victory in Bhokardan in Maharashtra is also clear. The Congress and the NCP will have to hang together if they want to remain in business. The NCP, which had an alliance with the Congress and the Republican Party of India, managed to wrest the seat from the BJP. The BJP, which had retained the seat since 1990, could not save it despite hardselling Hindutva. Bhokardan has also set the stage for a pre-poll pact between Sharad Pawar’s party and the Congress he quit over the issue of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins. On the flip side, it is the failure of the two Janata Dals to come together that ensured the Congress victory in Hamnabad in Karnataka. Similarly, the PDP retained the Pampore seat by a larger margin because its alliance with the Congress and other parties remains intact.

The bypoll results may delineate the shape of a Congress-led alliance, which could include the Samajwadi Party (in UP), RJD (in Bihar), NCP (in Maharashtra), DMK (in Tamil Nadu) and the PDP (in Jammu and Kashmir), and hasten the process of this broader unity.