A merger of parties typically occurs with an eye on enhancing the vote share of the entities seeking to coalesce. The benefits of this have been seen repeatedly in India, and there is no reason to doubt that this will be the case with the coming together of the so-called “Janata Parivar” parties. Five of the six parties which announced their merger earlier this week — the Samajwadi Party of UP, the JD(U) and RJD of Bihar, the INLD of Haryana and the SJD of Karnataka — are regional outfits confined to a single state. The sixth, the SJP of former PM Chandra Shekhar, is no longer a recognisable force even in UP from where the late Prime Minister came.
But what’s true is that leaders of all these parties were once in the Janata Party which held power at the Centre, and for a time stood in opposition to the then Jan Sangh (the latter day BJP), which had merged into the Janata but was virtually driven out of it (and re-grouped under the banner of BJP after facing great vicissitudes) because it owed allegiance to the RSS.
If the former JP constituents become one parliamentary entity, their clout as a group in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha will be enhanced, and the new entity will be entitled to “national party” status. Samajwadi stalwart Mulayam Singh Yadav can once again entertain the dream of becoming Prime Minister, although that is always a big ask. But it would seem that Mr Mulayam’s party has got into the merger game with this as an objective.
As for the contest in the states, it is evident that the Assembly election in Bihar can potentially show the benefits of merger with the pooling of votes of the RJD and the JD(U). None of the other Janata combine parties will matter in Bihar. The BJP would be wary. A defeat in Bihar, on the heels of the disaster it met with in Delhi, can lead to questions about Modi’s vote catching ability, and that can have its own implications.
Specifically in the Bihar context, in order to leverage all factors, the Janata-style parties (RJD-JD(U)) would be over reaching if they ignored the claims of the Congress in a seat-sharing exercise. The merger of the Janata fraternity can show its historical worth if it can rise above small disputes, to which our parties are all too prone.
