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For the first time, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have to depend on two past-masters of coalition politics – TDP Chief N Chandrababu Naidu and JD(U) chief and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar – to form the government. The BJP’s tally of nearly 240 seats till results last came in falls way short of the half-way mark of 272 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha which is where TDP which was set to win 16 seats till late evening and JD(U) with about 12 seats till about 7.30 pm get to play the kingmakers in the BJP’s attempts to form a government for the third successive term.
Sources said a high-level meeting was under way at BJP President JP Nadda’s residence where Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Home Minister Amit Shah too were present. The Prime Minister is believed to have spoken to Naidu and is expected to join his swearing-in as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. A meeting of the BJP-led NDA is believed to have been scheduled for Wednesday for which both Nitish Kumar and Naidu have been invited.
Important Role
Naidu and Nitish Kumar are no strangers to a BJP-led alliance, having been members of the NDA headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee in the late 1990s and early part of this century.
Nitish Kumar | Photo Credit: -
Sources said there is a very good chance that Nitish’s party will get important portfolios in the forthcoming government.
However, a major bone of contention is Nitish’s insistence on ‘special status’ to Bihar. This demand has been consistently rejected by the Union Government thus far. But with Nitish gaining political heft and the BJP depending on its numerical strength to keep the government afloat, he is expected to push for it in the coming months.
Another point of friction between them is the growing revenue deficit of the Bihar government on account of its liberal job policy. Nitish Kumar has promised 10 lakh government jobs to unemployed youth in Bihar and has already appointed more than 2.7 lakh teachers, increasing the salary and pension bill of the government which already has a heavy revenue deficit.
TDP national president N Chandrababu Naidu | Photo Credit: RAO GN
Chandrababu Naidu too has had a reputation for extracting benefits from the Centre when he was part of the Vajpayee-led government. In 2018, when TDP walked out of NDA, the issue was financial support for Andhra Pradesh. The TDP had then moved a no-confidence motion against the BJP government in the Lok Sabha over denial of ‘Special Category Status’ for the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh and a host of other issues. He is back again in the NDA and is most likely to be sworn as CM of Andhra Pradesh and his demands from the Centre remain unchanged.
New government
The Capital was abuzz with talk of a Deputy Chief Minister’s post being created to accommodate the new allies but sources said this is highly unlikely. The three senior leaders and Union Ministers – Amit Shah (Home), Nitin Gadkari (Road Transport) and Rajnath Singh (Defence) – have retained their seats. No major change is expected at the top which means apart from Shah, Gadkari and Singh, Nirmala Sitharaman and S Jayshankar are likely to come back to the Union Cabinet. However, new faces from TDP and JD(U) are naturally likely to get important portfolios in the new Cabinet.
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