Snubbing the Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM), Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) chief Prakash Ambedkar on Monday announced an alliance with the Bihar-based Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Muslim League for the crucial Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election to be held in February.
Mr. Ambedkar, grandson of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, projected his alliance as an alternative to the BJP and the ruling tripartite Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition (of the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress) in the BMC.
Nonetheless, the VBA chief said the doors were open for an alliance with both the Congress and the Shiv Sena if they so wished.
“We held discussions with the leaders of the Indian Union Muslim League and the RJD and it was decided that the three parties should come together. Discussions are also under way with some other organisations that wish to join this front. The seat-sharing will be by mid-January,” Mr. Ambedkar said, adding that it was ultimately up to the voter to decide whether this “third alternative” would work in the much-anticipated civic polls scheduled early next year.
Neither Mr. Ambedkar’s VBA nor its estranged one-time ally, the AIMIM, has any significant presence in Mumbai, with the 236-seat BMC being dominated by the Sena (97 seats) and the BJP (82 seats).
Mr. Ambedkar rebuked the AIMIM for not contesting on a secular plank during the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
“Though the OBCs voted in the Aurangabad Lok Sabha contest [2019] from a secular position, the AIMIM there did not fight from a secular stand…as things stand, the OBCs within our party are not willing for an alliance with the AIMIM,” he said, while explaining why the VBA could not ally with Mr. Owaisi’s party.
The VBA’s alliance with the AIMIM had queered the pitch for the Opposition Congress and the NCP in at least 10 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in 2019 by eating into their traditional Dalit-minority vote-bank.
However, the VBA-AIMIM alliance was split wide open immediately after the general election following bickering over seat-sharing before the Maharashtra Assembly election in October the same year.
Since the crumbling of the alliance, the VBA has emerged as a somewhat disoriented party, having lost the initiative that Mr. Ambedkar had seized following the 2018 Bhima Koregaon clashes, which led to a significant proportion of the Ambedkarite community gravitating towards the VBA.
Remarking that the BMC poll would be fought on the development plank, Mr. Ambedkar said the plight of the employees of the cash-strapped Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) and the long drawn-out strike by desperate transport workers would be a critical factor in determining the outcome of the election.
“The MVA Government has failed to take any concrete policy decisions with regards to the strike by hard up MSRTC workers,” he said.
Mr. Ambedkar rued the fact that the Congress had failed to make an alliance with the VBA in the 2019 general election and kept on dubbing the VBA ‘the B-team of the BJP’ despite the latter’s earnest efforts to seek an alliance with them.
