Upcoming polls reflect India's fractured politics

Laloo Prasad Yadav's body language is different this time. He does not have the touch of certainty which he exuded in the last three elections in Bihar from 1990.

What worries him is that he does not know whether the Muslim vote bank, commanding nearly 16.5 per cent of the electorate, would honour the cheque his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has liberally drawn on it in the past.

The impression is that the Muslims have begun moving towards the Congress which is not opposing Laloo, a minister at the centre, but which is not supporting him either.

The Congress is also posturing as if it is on the side of his rival, Ram Vilas Paswan of Lok Janshakti Party (LJP), again a minister at the centre.

This is bad enough. The worse is that the Congress while flirting with the two is trying to retrieve its old Muslim-Dalit base. It looks like winning more than 27 seats, its last tally in the 243-member assembly.

To the embarrassment of Laloo, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has said during her election campaign that law and order in Bihar required "great improvement".

(There are some 20,000 non-bailable warrants pending execution in the state and the number of recorded kidnappings in the state since Laloo's reign is 32,600.)

Still Laloo believes he has played a trump card by releasing the interim report of the Banerjee commission which has said that the fire that burnt down the train compartment at Godhara was "accidental". Laloo feels he has helped the Muslim community, blamed for setting the compartment on fire.

Alarming report

Yet the community is worked up since the state minority commission has said in a report that the Muslims in Bihar continue to remain at the lowest rung and get neither employment nor other benefits in proportion to their population.

However, Laloo's plus point is that Bihar has had no communal riot since the advent of his party's rule. But the argument for a change is heard persistently as you move from one end to the other in the state.

The criticism by the BJP the entire leadership in the state is making very little effect except saffronising the atmosphere in certain urban areas.

The upper caste, the Bhumihars, is still sticking to the Congress as it has done in the past. The BJP's support is from the Kurmis, the flock of Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United).

The Bihar assembly may turn out to be a hung one, giving Laloo a chance to manipulate a majority and making the Congress force Paswan to support him. Paswan says it will be the other way round, Laloo supporting him.

Shibu Soren, a tribal leader, has made a poll alliance with the Congress and the combination may form the government. But what pulls down Soren is the taint of corruption. A big defeat stares in the face of the BJP in Jharkhand where it is in power at present.

Tribals who are in a majority in the state have come to see through the party which they associate with the rich. The substantial Christian community is also solidly against the BJP.

Haryana's problem is different. The Congress is appropriating the anti-incumbency vote against Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala.

The BJP is nowhere in the picture although Chautala tried his best to woo the party. The Congress may suffer a bit because of its internal wrangling but should otherwise make it comfortably.

Whatever the three assembly results may prove or not, they reflect once again India's fractured political scene: no party has a countrywide base. The Congress had it once but it has practically no showing in more than half the country.

The BJP has been primarily confined to the Hindi-speaking states where it has been able to play the religious card to the detriment of pluralistic polity.

The Left, which began with its own government in Kerala as far back as in 1951, has not gone beyond two other states West Bengal and Tripura. It is obvious that it has not been able to comprehend how the mind of Hindi-speaking states ticks.

But the new phenomenon that is emerging is that regional parties also cannot do without the support of all-India players. It is a strange mishmash, making politics dependent on convenience, caste or combination, not on principles, values or ideological considerations.

Take the Congress, the all-India party, in Bihar. It is having an understanding with the RJD on the one hand and the LJP on the other. The Congress is hardly bothered about the election manifestoes of the two.

Still the Congress has to have an alliance with them to reach the backward classes through Laloo and the dalits through Paswan.

In Jharkhand again, the Congress has joined hands with the regional party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha. It is the same story with the BJP in Bihar. It has aligned itself with the regional party the Janata Dal (United) led by state leader Nitish Kumar.

The BJP could not win over Paswan who had walked out of the Vajpayee government following the Gujrat carnage. Still the BJP is giving him an indirect support in the hope that if he falls short of a majority, it may make up the numbers.

Glow of freedom

In fact, local problems come to the fore whenever there is any election, state or the general. The first few elections after independence had issues which transcended the state borders. The glow of freedom was still there and people were keen to see India on the international firmament.

Those considerations have got dimmed over the years. It was P.N. Haksar, a Leftist secretary to the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who separated the Lok Sabha and assembly polls. He believed that local issues would dominate the assembly polls and the national ones in the Lok Sabha election.

What he had in mind was a country which should discuss its national issues as dispassionately as the states should their own problems. They should not mix the two.

Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a former Rajya Sabha MP. He can be contacted at knayar@gulfnews.com