In the Opposition parties’ meeting that concluded in Bengaluru on Tuesday, the Grand Alliance was named “India”.
The main opposition parties Samajvadi Party, RLD and Apna Dal Kamerawadi from Uttar Pradesh participated in this meeting. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav said in the Bengaluru meeting that history will remember this day as ‘Bengaluru movement’. But the real challenge of this unity meeting of opposition parties is Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh is the largest state in the country with 80 Lok Sabha seats and with this strength, the path to power at the Centre passes through this crucial state.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had almost destroyed the strategy of all the parties by winning 62 seats. In such a situation, the biggest challenge of the Opposition parties is also Uttar Pradesh this time. The largest opposition party in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party, got a little over 18 per cent votes in the last Parliamentary polls, when it was in alliance with the BSP.
Congress had fought alone and got 6.36 percent votes. At the same time, the vote share of his SP’s ally RLAD was 1.68 percent. Janata Dal (U) got only 0.01 percent votes. Shivpal Yadav fought separately in the last Lok Sabha elections and then his party, Pragatisheel Samajwadi Party, got just 0.3% votes. On the other hand, the BSP, which has not attended this Opposition meeting yet, got 19.42 percent votes in the 2019 elections. This time, the BSP is on a different path in the elections. If the vote share of BSP is removed, then the vote share of all these parties together is 26.46 which is almost half of the 51.18 percent votes that the BJP alliance got. Now, talking about the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, SP, BSP and RLD contested separately and their combined vote share was 42.98%. In comparison, BJP alone got 42.63% votes in UP.
The SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, who reached Bengaluru to attend the second general meeting of opposition parties, targeted the BJP government by saying that the two-thirds of the country’s population is against the BJP. He said that the Opposition is united to wipe out the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Describing the importance of the Opposition unity, Akhilesh Yadav said that the country and the people have to be saved.
He said that the government is misusing the CBI and the ED against the Opposition leaders and now, the Opposition parties have geared up against the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The Opposition’s strategy is being made in Bengaluru to compete with the BJP-led NDA alliance. Heads of 26 parties participated in the second meeting in Bengaluru.
It remains to be seen if the Opposition unity in Bengaluru will have an impact on ground in states like UP, Bihar and West Bengal which are battleground states. Here, the opposition parties have always competed with each other for same vote or constituency while BJP votes have remained intact. The meet in Bengaluru is the beginning of the Opposition plan as much will depend on seat sharing adjustments that allies are ready to make which will require lots of compromises.
