The Indian Express

: Now that the Congress and the Samajwadi Party have decided to put their complicated past behind them for higher political imperatives, speculation is rife about the nature of the arrangement and what internal compromises would get the slippery SP to commit to the Congress’s agenda. While the SP’s political promiscuity raises eyebrows, the fact remains that the party has proved its consummate understanding of the coalition era. Instead of ideological rigor mortis, it grasps the fact that improvisation is key and political decisions are not always a series of straight dialectical choices.

And moreover, for the Congress, this is a more compatible partnership than the structurally flawed coalition with the now-estranged Left. The Left front is at loggerheads with the Congress in the states where it holds power, and consequently the alliance was bound to be an ongoing tussle in practical terms. The SP and the Congress though can claim common interests with a straight face. For all the UNPA’s fond dreams or the predictions of a fragmented political landscape, electoral logic in India seems to favour a two-player system — typically involving one major party that draws smaller allies with overlapping interests into its force field. The four-cornered struggle in Uttar Pradesh between the SP, BSP, Congress and BJP has now decisively rendered the SP and BSP as the two significant poles.

At the national level too, a two-coalition dynamic seems to have entrenched itself, with a constellation of small parties clustering around the Congress or the BJP. While the BJP has comfortably adapted to junior partner status in many states, the Congress has, up till now, found it difficult to reconcile itself to its diminished status in many states, preferring to go it alone. A Congress-SP arrangement could bring greater clarity to Uttar Pradesh politics, and on the flip side the SP hitching itself to a national coalition may endow it with a more reasonable, more responsible vision. So is this budding alliance plain opportunism or a mature acceptance of changed political realities? But why choose between stark alternatives — the answer might be somewhere in between, and both.

editor@expressindia.com