Combine forces

The opposition needs to get its act and tact together

- K.M. CHANDRASEKHAR

There has been much noise recently about the opposition finally uniting and confronting the BJP with a formidable, invincible front. How much of this is fact, how much bluster, how much imagination?

To begin with, this view is founded on the largely fallacious reasoning that since the BJP got a total vote share of only 37.36 percent of the votes cast in the 2019 general elections, about 63 percent must be against them. Hence, if there is a one-on-one election, the opposition will win hands down. This may not happen as a matter of course. A voter who votes in favour of, say, the AAP, need not necessarily be hostile to the BJP, but only that he prefers a particular candidate from the AAP. If, under the united opposition, he is confronted with the choice of voting for a left party, he may well prefer the BJP candidate.

Nor do state elections give any indication of the choice for the Centre. In the run-up to the 2019 general elections, the Congress won in four states, but they could not muster enough vote share even from those states in the general elections. To take just one example, the vote shares of the BJP and the Congress in Rajasthan were 38.8 percent and 39.3 percent respectively in the 2018 state election. In the 2019 general elections, the vote shares were 59.07 percent for the BJP and 34.5 percent for the Congress. In fact, for the Congress, 15 of the 52 seats in the Lok Sabha in 2019 came just from one small state-Kerala.