The 15-party opposition meet in Patna last week, hosted by Bihar chief minister and the JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar, has left it to the next meet in Shimla to firm up a joint plan.

The Patna meeting remained exploratory, and bought time for itself before the first draft of the alliance could be formalised. It saw the presence of key opposition parties such as the DMK, TMC, Left parties, NCP and AAP, and it was significantly attended by the top leaders of Congress. It’s early to say, however, how much of it will turn into a steady rapport.

At the same time, a few strong regional parties like the BRS, YSR Congress, and BJD were expectedly absent, having either ruled themselves out of the alliance or more inclined to weighing options far longer – even eyeing a post-poll scenario.

But that doesn’t mean any seal of coherence in the proposed 15-party alliance. The region-specific tensions between these prospective allies are obvious – TMC’s rivalry with Congress and the Left in West Bengal and LDF-UDF duel in Kerala are some of the clear indicators of such divergence. 

Moreover, there are specific party positions which aren’t keeping potential allies on the same page. AAP, for instance, kept out of the press conference attended by different leaders in Patna in what was seen as its unease over the Congress’s reluctance to support its opposition to the central government’s Delhi ordinance. More such challenges could be expected in future.

One important reason behind such difficulties in stitching an alliance of national scale is that the process of coming together isn’t defined by chemistry but the strategic call of arithmetic. The electoral calculations prod allies to envisage that if they keep out of each other’s path or reinforce each other, the common adversary – the BJP-led coalition at the centre in this case – can be defeated. They reckon that that’s one of their more realistic shots at a power shift at the centre. In many ways, anti-BJPism is the pivot around which the parties are seeking to galvanise a combined electoral fight. 

In terms of electoral arithmetic, the idea is premised on supporting one candidate in each constituency against the rival alliance’s candidate. The strategy is to look for a higher index of opposition unity or IOU. The concept, developed from the work on multiparty swing by analysts like Michael Stead, was later applied to the Indian political scene, with considerable variation, by Prannoy Roy and Ashok Lahiri in their 1984 study. In his 2019 work The Verdict, Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala, explained the concept in simpler terms.

The IOU is the vote percentage of the largest opposition party multiplied by 100 and divided by the combined vote percentage of all the opposition parties.

In the strategic sense, this is what a combined opposition will try to push. But, it’s obviously easier said than done. 

The coalition playbook of the nineties or the early years of this century had either anti-Congressism, which had its origins in the sixties, or the anti-BJPism, served as the shorthand for ideology for the prospective allies. 

The move is again more defined by the need to mount a national challenge to the BJP-led regime at the centre. But, in addition to  what they are opposing, there seems little to suggest what they are standing for or what they are offering. The joint plan obviously has to get this part of the political messaging clear.

The elephant in the room, however, remains the leadership question. 

The imperative of alliance-making at this stage entailed that the question is kept at the backburner. That’s what the host of the Patna meet, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U), was keen on emphasising in the run-up to the meet. Even if that doesn’t derail the formative stage of the alliance, the question wouldn’t be buried for long.  

If the smaller allies can be expected to wrestle with their own distrust of the Congress in a post-poll scenario, the Congress has also been keen on showing that its primacy as the national challenger to the current regime at the centre remains intact in any such challenge.

It isn’t also clear how this approach to alliance-building will play out in the dynamics of political campaigns of the last two Lok Sabha polls where the terms of contest became personality-driven and like a presidential duel in their projection. 

Holding back a face to take on the national popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi might deprive the BJP of a definite target to assail in the campaign, but it can also be seen as a glaring gap to be attacked in the opposition challenge: the indecision in coming up with a leader and hence, a recipe for political instability. 

The political compulsions of the coalition era at the centre had steeped the parties and key players into a culture of alliance-making before and after the polls. Some of those practices  faded into disuse in the last few years. Such exercises are seeking a reinvention. 

Media reports, for instance, suggest that the Patna meet explored the ideas of early and joint campaigns, starting in August, to project to the voters the united political force as an alternative at the centre. Even such exercises will need to work far more than mere optics to bring some degree of credibility to the sincerity and strength of the political challenge this formation is likely to pose in the parliamentary polls.

As the alliance-making exercises of the Patna initiative moves to Shimla next month, the opposition parties on board would be aiming for a blueprint for the challenging electoral year ahead. Such a blueprint, however, would need to settle some internal lines of friction and streamline a common campaign against the external challenger. In doing so, they may have to grapple with the idea of what they represent and offer, rather than merely speaking of who and what they oppose.