The Janata Dal(U)-Samata Party merger is aimed at repeating the grand performance the two parties had displayed in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar and undoing the “blunder” they committed by falling apart and thus allowing the Laloo-Rabri regime to retain power in 2000. JD(U), that included Samata Party, with Sharad Yadav as its chief and the BJP working in tandem, had scored heavily – they secured 41 out of 54 Lok Sabha seats in united Bihar. The RJD-Congress alliance, on the other hand, has been reduced to just 12 seats.

The longing to repeat that dream performance has led Nitish Kumar, George Fernandes and Sharad Yadav to bury their hatchet in the run up to the Lok Sabha polls next year and put up a united show to avoid a division in the “anti-Laloo” vote bank.

Despite the denial of Fernandes, head of the new avatar of the JD(U), that the move is “not Bihar centric”, the merger is Bihar centric by all yardsticks. JD(U) and Samata Party have hardly any presence elsewhere. And Bihar holds the key to the political destiny of Sharad Yadav and Fernandes. But will the merger enable the NDA to repeat history? Political observers doubt that the NDA would be able to apply the formula this time around as effectively as it did in the last Lok Sabha polls. Moreover, the new avatar JD(U) is afflicted with a number of limitations that were not present its previous form.

For instance, the old JD(U) which helped the NDA made the redoubtable Laloo Prasad Yadav bite dust in his own backyard had the veteran Dalit leader Ram Vilas Paswan in its fold. Now in isolation Paswan and his Lok Janshakti Party may not be a match to the NDA or the RJD-Congress combine. But the Dalit leader commands an effective clout among members of his community. And if he joins the combination opposed to the NDA, he will surely cause substantial damage to the ruling coalition at the Centre.

As of now, Ram Vilas Paswan has been advocating for the Congress-led “secular alliance” to unseat the “communal” forces from power. Paswan who resigned from the Union council of ministers last year, has repeatedly stated that he will have no truck with the “communal” NDA. “It was the biggest blunder of my life to join the NDA,” Paswan said in Patna recently. In addition to the Paswan factor, the new avatar JD(U) does not look as cohesive a political outfit as it had in its previous avatar. The powerful Yadav leader of Mithila belt, Devendra Yadav (MP), and two JD(U) MLAs supporting him have objected to the merger and have decided to stay away from it. Similarly, Samata Party MPs, Raghunath Jha and Brahmanand Mandal, have raised a banner of revolt against the merger describing it as “illegal” and “inimical” to the interests of party workers. These rebels are said to be in touch with Laloo Prasad Yadav who, with his hawkish eye on the developments, is working overtime to create disunity in the merged outfit. Moreover, buoyed with the grand success of the 1999 Lok Sabha polls in Bihar, Atal Behari Vajpayee drafted nearly a dozen members from Bihar in his council of ministers. By doing so, the Prime Minister might have thought that he had rewarded Bihar’s voters for giving him as many as 41 MPs. But it may prove counter productive for the NDA in the polls next year for except Nitish Kumar, almost all the Central ministers are set to face a hostile electorate due to non-performance. His detractors describe Nitish Kumar as the “railway minister of Bihar.” But the fact remains that he has carved out an image of a “performing minister” by setting up the East Central Railways headquarters at Hajipur, getting approved the 2,200-MW Super Thermal Power Project in Barh, his constituency, and introducing a plethora of new trains passing through Bihar. Ironically, he has also earned praise from his chief opponent, Laloo Prasad Yadav, who described Kumar as the “real vikas purush” of Bihar.

But ministers like CP Thakur, George Fernandes, Rajiv Pratap Rudi, Sharad Yadav and Sanjay Paswan will find it hard to explain to the electorate the worth of their being elected and becoming ministers. They have hardly anything to show by way of their contribution. They will have to depend entirely on the delicate caste equations in their respective constituencies to retain their seats.

And though he himself doesn’t believe in the “politics of development”, Laloo Yadav is always on the lookout to nail the “non-performing” Central ministers. “George and Sharad are migratory birds who come hovering on the Bihar skies only during the polls,” is the RJD chief’s favourite line these days. And whatever be their merits, Laloo’s jargons have worked against his opponents more than once.

The division of the state is another factor which has weakened the BJP in truncated Bihar. The BJP alone had swept the polls in what is now Jharkhand, winning 11 of the 23 seats it had won in united Bihar in 1999. Now, in the rest of Bihar, it will have to depend heavily on JD(U)’s strength.

And if the NDA has learnt a lesson from its defeat in the 2000 Assembly polls, Laloo Yadav, a master poll strategist, too, has learnt his from his party’s 1999 poll debacle. He is working hard to strike an alliance with the Communist Party of India which had fallen apart from Laloo Yadav during the 1999 and 2000 polls. Sources in the CPI, which had won nine Lok Sabha seats in the company of Laloo Yadav in 1991, say that the comrades are now gravitating to the idea of joining hands with the RJD to regain their old status as the state’s main Left party.

Given the NDA’s necessity to avoid a division in the anti-Laloo vote bank in the state, a strong section of the BJP led by Opposition leader Sushil Kumar Modi tried its best to bring back Paswan within the folds of the NDA. But Modi’s efforts didn’t work, for Nitish Kumar and Sharad Yadav reportedly put their foot down against any move to bring the Dalit leader back in the ruling coalition.

In fact, the ego clash between Ram Vilas Paswan and Nitish Kumar was what had led to the separation of the Samata Party and the Janata Dal(U) in 1999. And the battle of egos continues, threatening the prospects of the NDA in Bihar.