Mamata Banerjee’s big win in the high-prestige and high-octane West Bengal assembly election last winter has triggered the possibility of a new federal front against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Regional parties, party factions, small and big political family firms — all seem to be involved in parleys, political intrigue and even publicity-generating photo-ops. Inciting speculation and working across regions, a ‘coalition’ to take on the behemoth that is the BJP’s election machinery seems to be afoot.
Weakened states and regional parties in the Modi-Shah era have made the repeat of a 1990s-style anti-BJP coalition at the Centre seem impossible. That’s when Prashant Kishor began emerging, not as the face of a new coalition against Modi but as a strategic glue of all the opposition regional parties. Having successfully helmed campaigns starting with Modi in 2014 and every prestige regional campaign against him since then, Kishor has astutely understood that the Modi mandate cannot be contested regionally.
