This refers to the editorial, “A family reunion, nowIJ” (November 11). You have rightly said that the yet-to-be formed ‘Janata parivar’ consists of those beleaguered parties that have tasted the bitter pill of defeat at the hands of the BJP, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where the party had done extraordinary well.
But the grouping is unlikely to materialise as even the left parties, besides the AIADMK, the Biju Janata Dal and the Trinamool Congress are yet not in the picture. The protagonists of the amalgamation put this analogy with the Janata Party formation during the later part of Emergency, but it does not hold water, as during Emergency, all the non-Congress parties had merged into one conglomerate, the Janata Party, since their leaders had been persecuted by the dictatorship of Indira Gandhi. Now there is no such autocracy in Mr Narendra Modi’s rule, and the Government is trying to get the country out from the mess created by the Congress-led UPA.