Alliance Woes

There's still a month to go before elections and already the alliance woes have started for all the three fronts.

At the time of writing this post, Lalu has pulled a fast one on the Congress and finalised a deal with Paswan leaving only three seats for the Grand old party. In UP, Mulayam has already ditched the Congress and will be fighting on his own. 'Pawar' problems for the Congress continue in Maharashtra and the Congress is in confusion whether to fight the elections in Karnataka on its own or with the JD(S). The only silver lining is the tie-up with Mamta in Bengal, but again it looks as though Mamta will benefit more from the tie-up.

The NDA is no better position. The BJD has deserted it, Amma from Tamil Nadu is not interested to tie-up with NDA. And in Andhra, neither Naidu nor Chiranjeevi wants to tie up with them. Their deal with the Shiv Sena though is through and the tie-up with the JD(U) seems to be sealed in Bihar. UP, Haryana and Assam are other places where the NDA has entered into tie-ups with Ajit Singh, Chautala and AGP respectively.

The fledgeling Third Front is in trouble even before it started. Behenji wants to be PM and doesn't want to tie up with anyone. The Left has tied-up with Jayalalitha and Naidu, but knows that both of them are capable of ditching the left after the elections. And poor Deve Gowda is still enamoured of the PM post for him or his son, but he will find it difficult to get more than 2 seats in Karnataka. And by the way, the Left is having its own alliance problems in

So, which alliance has the advantages? None of these! It is only after the results are out, we will know where each party stands w.r.t alliances.