After the DMK, the Sharad Pawar-led NCP is feeling uncomfortable in the UPA following the dissolution of the board of directors of the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank. On the other hand, a debate has also begun in the Congress on how long the party should go ahead with the coalition experiment when it has charismatic leaders with an all-India appeal and the party’s presence across the country.
If DMK chief M. Karunanidhi is openly defending his daughter and sitting MP Kanimozhi, now in jail in the 2G spectrum scam, the dissolution of board of directors has not gone down well in the NCP.
A section of the Maharashtra Congress has already started speaking against the coalitions to suggest that the NCP has no future.
UPA-2 has yet to see a structured mechanism of coordination between the Congress and its allies. The Congress has constituted coordination committees between the party and its governments at state level. Such mechanism also exists in states where the Congress has been sharing power with its allies.
UPA-1 saw the formal coordination committee between the Congress and the Left parties backing the Centre from outside. Leaders of the two parties used to meet frequently to discuss issues related to policy and floor coordination. But in UPA-2, such a suggestion is neither coming from the Samajwadi Party, BSP, RJD supporting from outside, nor the allies sharing power at the Centre.
Interestingly, the SP, BSP and the RJD are the main rivals of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
The Congress had defeated the BJP-led NDA in the 2004 general elections through pre-poll alliances with like-minded parties. It had even allied with the Left outside West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura in the Lok Sabha elections.
But the policy of alliances was “modified” in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections after the Congress unilaterally made it clear that alliances would be state specific and not at the national level. The NCP is the only constituent of the UPA wanting to spread outside Maharashtra. This had compelled the NCP to ally with the LDF in Kerala and the BJD in Orissa and others.
But these developments are not worrying the Congress managers who are confident to prove numbers in Parliament even without the DMK (18 members in the Lok Sabha) and the NCP (9).
This is because they are sure of getting the support of the Samajwadi Party (22), BSP (21), AIADMK (9), RLD (5), JD-S (3), besides 13 one-member parties, nine Independents and others. This is because members of these parties do not want to face a mid-term poll.
The government has already increased the fund for the MPLAD scheme by `3 crore per year to ensure that members of the smaller parties would back it if the current equations in the UPA.