Battle for a votebank: SP spurns Congress

The decision assumes importance in the light of the seat adjustment between the two parties in the 1998 general elections. The arrangement brokered by the Congress with SP as well as the Republican Party of India (RPI) gave them an unexpected bounty of 37 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in the State. It was hailed as the crack formula since it aligned Muslims and Dalits with the majority party which helped beat the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition by huge margins. The Congress would have liked to repeat the formula in the Assembly elections as well.

However, party officials say that the formula emerged less out of a confluence of common interests and more from the personal equation that SP leader Mulayam Singh Yadav shared with Sharad Pawar. Senior office-bearers of the SP have not been pleased at the disposition of Congress leaders towards them during the last year. An effort to bring together their independent protests against the Justice Srikrishna Commission report last August came to a naught. The displeasure among SP leaders has sharpened in the last few months after Prataprao Bhosale took over as president of the Pradesh Congress Committee.

However, the ground reality of late 1997 and early 1998 that Muslims will not trust the Congress again has changed and the community has “returned” to the party in substantial numbers, say party leaders. Congress president Sonia Gandhi has often expressed sentiments, Pawar too has spoken of the Congress regaining the confidence of the community. Against this backdrop, the Congress is not too eager for any understanding but has kept its options open.

Aligning with the Congress under the changed circumstances means that the SP will find it difficult to establish its stronghold on the votebank; it may be better to fight the next election on its own strength, was the repeated line in the meeting. Amar Singh was categorical that the party “never had an alliance, only seat adjustments” with the Congress which will not be repeated.

The SP believes it got a raw deal: it was given only three seats and lost one, Mumbai North-West, by a narrow margin of 152 votes. “The Congress allowed Janata Dal to put up a candidate on our seat… it wasn’t fair,” said Azmi. Besides, he emphasised that the Congress policies in the last few months at the Centre “are designed to strengthen the BJP”.