Patna,(BiharTimes): After Janata Party in 1977 and Janata Dal in 1989 another attempt is being made to merge different political parties to fight the ruling party. While on the last two occasions the merger was made to unitedly taken on the Congress party this time the main aim is to combat the rise of the BJP.

While in the first merger the then Bharatiya Jan Sangh––the earlier version of the BJP––was a major constituent in 1989 the saffron party helped the Janata Dal government under V P Singh from outside.
In 2014 the case is totally different. The parties are ganging up against the BJP, which in itself is a recognition of the fact that the latte is strong and needs to be combatted.But the big question is: whether these six parties are really serious in merger?

Apart from the two Bihar parites, the RJD and JD(U), how will the other four parties gain in their respective states by the merger. Samajwadi Party, Janata Dal (Secular), Indian National Lok Dal and virtually extinct Samajwadi Janata Party may not gain much in their respective state.

For example, how will the Samajwadi Party be benefited by the merger as the rest five parties have no say in UP. Had BSP been among the parties it would have made some sense.Similarly INLD and JD(S) are not going to get anything in electoral term in Haryana and Karnataka respectively. So apart from RJD and JD(U) the maximum the other four parties may like is a formation of a Front like the one conceptualized in mid-1990s. But that experience did not last long, though the Left parties too played important role in them.

The next big problem is that of leadership. Deve Gowda is a spent force, Om Prakash Chautala incompetent to lead any such party or front. Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar may be the leader of equal stature, but will one of them recognize the other.

Then there is Sharad Yadav, who has no base of his own either in Bihar or UP or the state of his birth, Madhya Pradesh. Yet one can not deny the fact that he was till last year the convenor of the National Democratic Alliance and can be of some use in the new party too.If Nitish is ambitious and wants to emerge as the leader of the new party ready to challenge Narendra Modi, will he get the due support from other leaders? There is too much contradictions which need to be ironed out. What will be the relationship of the new merged party––likely to be named Samajwadi Janata Dal––with the Congress party.Anyway if the idea of merger clicks––at least in Bihar––and not elsewhere in the country, it may pose a big challenge to the BJP here.