Sometimes, success depends on the scaling down of ambition. Efforts at reuniting the secular parties with roots in the Janata Party of the 1970s have been under way ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party won a majority of its own in the 2014 Lok Sabha election. But a mega-merger was never going to be easy as the Janata Parivar parties, with varying strengths, spread across different regions, and united only by a common opponent, could not have easily agreed on the modalities of coming together. The Janata Dal (United) under Nitish Kumar is going ahead with the merger plan, but without three of the major parties — the Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh, the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka. The Janata Party was an artificial union of parties fighting the Congress during a difficult period in the country’s history; it suffered more than one split over ideological differences and conflicting pulls and pressures. Given this, re-unification can only be just as unnatural, prompted by nothing more than shifting political expediencies. Rather than wait endlessly for the mega-merger, Mr. Kumar chose to bring together what was possible in the circumstances — the Rashtriya Lok Dal of Ajit Singh, the Samajwadi Janata Party of Kamal Morarka, and the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha of Babulal Marandi.
What must be disquieting for Mr. Kumar is that the RJD, a partner in his government in Bihar, chose not to be part of the merger plan for the present. Given that the two parties had fought and won the State Assembly election last year without any major hiccup, a merger would have been a logical step. The reluctance of the RJD to commit on a merger highlights the post-poll tensions within the alliance. Also, there is the possibility that the RJD is seeking to expand its base at the expense of the JD (U) sooner or later. Given their different spheres of influence, the parties that are currently part of the merger plan, the JD (U), the RLD, the SJP and the JVM, are not political rivals; for the same reason, they would not be able to greatly add to one another’s vote share and increase winning chances in specific constituencies. Any merger would only be in name. The original rationale for the reunification of the Janata Parivar, to present a national-level alternative to the BJP, is no longer relevant. When the SP was involved in talks, the post-merger entity was meant to be an alternative to both the BJP and the Congress. But the JD (U), as well as the RJD, needs the Congress in Bihar. Therefore, as a national-level alternative, the Janata Parivar experiment was doomed to failure from the very outset. By scaling down the merger plans, Mr. Kumar appears to have sacrificed his ambition to play a bigger national role at the altar of pragmatism.
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