Telangana CM KC Rao organised an Opposition rally at Khammam but that’s not enough

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has a dream: to remove the Bharatiya Janata Party from the Centre. First, he went national—to begin with, in name—by renaming his Telangana Rashtra Samiti as Bharat Rashtra Samiti. Earlier, he also tried to join hands with his Bihar counterpart, Nitish Kumar, but that foray came a cropper. Undaunted, KCR is marching on; on Wednesday, he organised a rally at Khammam in Hyderabad, which was attended by Aam Admi Party chief and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, and CPI’s D Raja. Former Karnataka chief minister and senior JD(S) leader HD Kumaraswamy could not attend the meeting. Bihar Chief Minister was conspicuous by his absence, for which he offered a lame excuse. He said that he “didn’t know” about the rally: “I was busy with some other work. Those who were invited to his party’s rally must have gone there.” How on earth could he feign ignorance about such an important political event, especially when he himself says that, like KCR, he also has a dream—“to see Opposition leaders unite and forge ahead.” His absence from the rally was as important as was the presence of other regional leaders, for it underlined the lack of urgency and cohesion on the part of anti-BJP parties.

Various efforts to unite the Opposition seem ad hoc; unsurprisingly, the results are also episodic and uncertain. KCR met Kumar in Patna a few months ago; nothing came out of the meeting; they couldn’t address the press conference in a coordinated manner. There is no consensus even about the basic contours of the anti-BJP front that all of them want. One major point of dispute is the presence of the Congress—which, despite being in a poor shape today, still gets 17 per cent of the vote share—in the proposed alliance. Would the grand old party be part of the grand alliance that everyone is talking about? If yes, what role would it have? Would the GOP be first among equals? Or would it lead the alliance? Major anti-BJP leaders of the country have yet to answer these questions. Equally important are the essential features of policy that they would prefer. At the rally, KCR said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s policy is privatisation, whereas “our

policy is nationalisation.” This smacks of a yearning for the policy framework of the pre-liberalisation era, the era in which the entrepreneurial zeal was smothered by socialist rules and regulations. Everything about the Modi Government’s economic policies may not be perfect, but these are all in consonance with the reforms that the PV Narasimha Rao regime began in 1991 and the subsequent governments followed more or less. Against this backdrop, KCR’s emphasis on nationalisation appears quite jarring. KCR and other Opposition unity enthusiasts have to do better than that.