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Opposition parties bat for Meira Kumar to embarrass Nitish Kumar

By Lalit Sethi. Dated: 6/27/2017 12:00:34 PM

Sixteen political parties in the Opposition led by the Congress have decided not to give the BJP and its allies an uncontested walkover in the race for the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi's Raisina Hill. They have done so by nominating Mrs. Meira Kumar, daughter of Babu Jagjivan Ram; she is a former Speaker of the Lok Sabha and five times member of Parliament. She is opposing Mr. Ram Nath Kovind, Governor of Bihar, whose name Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on June 19 as the National Democratic Alliance candidate with the support of at least three parties outside the ruling NDA. Both contenders are Dalit leaders with a Bihar connection. It is now two Dalit leaders in the electoral contest.
Estimates suggest that Mr. Kovind, born in a farming family in a U.P. village, will win the election with ease on July 17 by polling 67 per cent of the votes in the Presidential electoral college with 1.1 million points of value. There are close to 780 members of Parliament and more than 4,000 members of 29 State legislatures. Mrs. Meira Kumar is expected to secure 33 per cent of the vote. This amounts to a substantial support for the Opposition candidate. The Congress, it is claimed, may be down, but not out, nor is it in "tatters", as some BJP commentators allege. This is a major political contest of great significance and the Opposition considers it will build up from now on until the 2019 General Election.
Ms. Mayawati has finally decided that her Bahujan Samaj Party's Rajya Sabha members will vote for Mrs. Meira Kumar. For the present the Bihar Mahagathbandhan comprising Mr. Nitish Kumar's JDU, Lalu Prasad Yadav's RJD, enjoys Congress support in the State Assembly, but could the Congress remain in the coalition, to which Mr. Nitish Kumar has given a jolt. Or has the Congress already given notice to reconsider its support even though it is a small player in Bihar. After it picked Mrs. Meira Kumar whom Lalu Yadav describes as Bihar's daughter? The JDU insists it is still not part of the NDA or the United Progressive Alliance and it will not reverse its decision to support Mr. Kovind because of Nitish's cordial ties with him in his position as Governor. The vote is a one-time decision. Will Lalu Yadav ditch Nitish at some point of time? Or has BJP made all the calculations that Lalu and his family, especially his daughter and son, are in the soup over their huge assets, alleged to be worth Rs. 1,000 crores, even though the Yadavs say that the book value of their properties in Delhi and elsewhere was perhaps 1-20th of the present market value? But is the original value of Rs. 50 crores or much less still too substantial, going back 15 or 20 years?
Will the BJP's friends like Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav and company try to pressure Lalu Yadav not to take on the might of the Prime Minister and fall in line by quitting the Opposition camp? Mr. M.S.Yadav might be doing so as he is unprepared to face legal hassles and music; and in this game of averting investigation and prosecution is his Man Friday, Mr. Amar Singh, a wheeler dealer of all seasons. This is a truly hypothetical situation at a time when certain alliances appear to be fragile.
Mrs. Meira Kumar, who is around 70, was unanimously chosen by the 16 parties' leaders with Mrs. Sonia Gandhi presiding on June 22. Like Mr Kovind, she started her life as a lawyer, joined the Foreign Service, from which she resigned in the 1990s to enter the Lok Sabha from Bijnor in U.P. and later got elected from Sasaram in Bihar. Mr. Kovind is a tall, broad man, standing more than 6 feet in his socks and a Yoga freak, like the Prime Minister, of which both gave public evidence separately, Mr. Modi in Lucknow, and Mr. Kovind in Chandigarh and New Delhi on June 21 at sessions with thousands of people in attendance on International Yoga Day.
For several weeks the BJP appeared to be giving the impression that it was striving hard to build a consensus within the NDA under the smokescreen of wooing the Opposition parties to agree to a single candidate of Mr. Narendra Modi's choice for all parties in the Presidential election. If the Prime Minister had already made up his mind, his senior Ministers and the party chief, Mr. Amit Shah, kept up the charade that the search was continuing vigorously. The names of Mrs. Sushma Swaraj and Mrs. Sumitra Mahajan were deliberately leaked or planted on the media via the political grist mill, the idea being to suggest that a woman was the best option; it turned out to be a spin of a political yarn, but in fact, a Dalit leader was ultimately the best move to silence storms in the political minefield. The long waiting game was over on Monday evening, June 19, as the BJP announced the name of Mr. Ram Nath Kovind, who is a former head of the party's Dalit Morcha and a two-time member of the Rajya Sabha.
Mr. Modi is obviously considering his decision as a masterstroke of sorts. Well, it might be so in wooing the strong Dalit lobby, Scheduled Castes and Tribes, other backward and those badly disadvantaged, who account for 26 to 35 per cent of India's population. This turned out to be his jump-off pad in winning over Mr. Nitish Kumar, the Bihar Chief Minister as well as the AIADMK and other Dalit parties in Tamil Nadu, which have displaced the age-old Brahmin and upper caste ruling class several decades after Independence; the "oppressed classes led by leaders like Mr. Annadurai and Ramaswamy Naicker overtook them with their uncompromising and slashing rhetoric. But in the bargain icons of the film world have become the top leaders.
Also on board now is the apparently angry Shiv Sena, which has been flexing its muscle and threatening a showdown with the BJP, besides Mr. Naveen Patnaik, the Odisha Chief Minister and supremo of the Biju Janata Dal, as well as Jaganmohan Reddy's YSR Congress as well as a party from Karnataka.
In 2012, the Shiv Sena had broken ranks with the BJP and voted with the then ruling United Progressive Alliance in the election of Mr. Pranab Mukherjee as President.
Lalit Sethi a Journalist of long standing and a commentator on Political and Social Issues.
—[IFS]