- Posted by One India, last updated on 19 July

opinion

Alok Kumar

Third Front: Are the leaders of the opposition starting to feel uneasy about the name of the new avatar Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance i.e. India? Will this discomfort increase so much that once again it will become the reason for the Third Front? It is true that the English nomenclature of United Democratic Alliance ie UPA India is less appealing to the leaders of the Hindi heartland. Is this one of the reasons why Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and Deputy Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav left Bengaluru before the final meeting with old Lalu Prasad? Like him, former Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, his uncle Prof. Absent from the dais before the press conference announcing the alliance with Ram Gopal.

This was the second meeting of the United Opposition Alliance in the southern state of Karnataka to target the Bharatiya Janata Party in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. That’s why it was possible to keep the English name of the alliance as India. There was no immediate objection to this from the leaders of neighboring Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the northeastern states including Andhra Pradesh and Bengal. Perhaps this would not have been possible in the first meeting of opposition unity in Patna. The uneasiness of the pro-Hindi leaders regarding the English name is natural. Self in Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh’s entire politics stood on the strength of being a staunch supporter of Hindi. It will be seen in the days to come how much Akhilesh Yadav liked the name India, who kept avoiding any serious initiative of an electoral alliance with the Congress.

If the controversy arising out of the name increases, its immediate effect will be seen in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh assembly elections. All these three states are going to undergo election test this year and are pro-Hindi linguistically.
This new avatar of the alliance has been named by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, so it is not possible that Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, former Chief Minister Kamal Nath and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel will be able to express their opinion on this. But this patch does not apply at all to any non-Congress leader involved in the alliance. As far as consensus is concerned, it does not apply at all to the leaders of the Janata Parivar from socialist background. There is a famous joke about ideological socialists that they are bound to disintegrate as soon as they gather.

The states where India may face problems in place of UPA include Uttar Pradesh with 80 Lok Sabha seats, Bihar with 40 seats. That means there are total 120 seats. Similarly, there are 25 Lok Sabha seats in Rajasthan, 29 in Madhya Pradesh and 11 Lok Sabha seats in Chhattisgarh i.e. a total of 65 seats in the states that do not have English names. Telangana, a state with strong Indian identity, has 17 Lok Sabha seats. There will be apprehension of a rift in solidarity due to this challenge of how the voters of the Hindi-speaking states of Jharkhand, 14 from Bihar, 10 from Haryana, 7 from Delhi, 5 from Uttarakhand, 4 from Himachal will be enticed by the nomenclature of India instead of UPA.

The leaders of Bihar had high hopes from this second meeting of opposition unity. Maybe that’s why there was more disappointment. The reason for hope lay in the ambition of Nitish Kumar, the spearhead of opposition unity. Instead of renaming the alliance, he felt that in this meeting, a consensus would be reached on the name of the coordinator of the opposition alliance. Nitish Kumar himself was the candidate for the convenor. RJD chief Lalu Prasad was also wishing that Nitish Kumar should get an offer to make him the convenor. This will pave the way for son Tejashwi Yadav to become the Chief Minister of Bihar. But there was no conclusive announcement on this.

This is the reason why all three got angry and postponed the organizers’ offer to address the people from the platform of the opposition. Also left Bangalore before the press conference. The organizers have decided to form a committee of eleven leaders to arrive at a decision on the convenor. This committee of India will announce its decision in the next meeting to be held in Maharashtra. In front of this High Power Committee, the responsibility of discussing the name of the future Prime Minister’s face with the opposition has also been assigned to compete with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

There is an inside news that the leaders of Janata Parivar have considered the strategy of committee formation as stubborn and evasive attitude of the host Congress. This dispute that emerged among the Janata Parivar leaders from Bangalore can be the reason for the formation of the Third Front.
Anyway, the apprehension of merger between the ruling Janata Dal (U) and RJD standing in opposition to the BJP in Bihar is being repeatedly expressed. In this merger, the Shigufa of Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, Jayant Chaudhary’s Rashtriya Lok Dal, Omprakash Chautala’s Indian National Lok Dal etc. are being included once again.

Anyway, the talk of uniting the constituents of the old Janata Dal family again is old. During the days of Mulayam Singh, Nitish Kumar had decided to merge his party Janata Dal U with the Samajwadi Party. He had talked about leaving his party symbol Arrow and contesting elections on a new symbol of the new party, even when in 2014 he saw the possibility of being the future prime ministerial candidate from the opposition. But if the front against the BJP was not possible by taking the Congress along with the non-Congress parties, then the merger proposal was kept aside.

Politics is a game of possibilities. In this possibility, Nitish Kumar is once again standing against the NDA i.e. NDA for a whole year. When the UPA became India and in its first meeting with the new name, when leaders of the Janata Parivar including Nitish Kumar did not get the expected attention, the scope for the formation of a third front is being created in the name of opposing the foreign language. Leaders like Lalu, Akhilesh, Naveen Patnaik, Jayant, Chautala etc. are seen fitting in this scope under the leadership of Nitish.

(The author has expressed his personal views in this article. Oneindia is not responsible for any views and information presented in the article.)