India: Ultra Right wing parties form Grand Hindu Alliance to contest Assembly elections in Delhi

From: The Hindu,
NEW DELHI, November 2, 2013

Ultra Right wing parties plan to contest Assembly elections

Shubhomoy Sikdar

They may not have had much electoral success in the past but claiming to stand for the protection of “rights and values of the Hindus”, the ultra Right wing parties across the spectrum are planning to contest the upcoming Delhi Assembly elections.

Four such parties--Rashtrawadi Sena, Hindu Mahasabha, Hindustan Nirman Dal and Rashtra Nirman Party--are contesting as a front called the Grand Hindu Alliance. Others, such as Shiv Sena, plan to go solo if a seat sharing arrangement does not work and fight the battle in a limited number of seats.

Incidentally, some of these parties had walked away with over 2,000 votes each in the last Assembly polls, in which the margin of victory was less than 5,000 in as many as 20 seats. Of these, the BJP had managed to win only six while the Congress had bagged 14.

History has not been on the side of any of these parties in any elections, be it the Assembly or municipal polls, but they can still prove to be spoilers for the BJP.

In the Capital, where candidates contesting even under the symbols of regional units such as Indian National Lok Dal have tasted success in the past, none of these right wing parties have made any major mark.

For instance the Shiv Sena contested nine seats in the 2008 Assembly elections and drew a blank. In the 2012 municipal elections too, when the party fielded 22 candidates, it met with a similar fate, said Ajit Singh, the vice-president of the Shiv Sena Delhi unit.

According to Mr. Singhone of the party’s influential leaders Jai Bhagwan Goyal broke ranks over their central leadership’s stance on North Indians. Mr. Goyal went on to form a splinter group Rashtrawadi Sena which contested a few seats and lost all of them.

This time round, leading what is now a five-year-old party and a better and more cohesive unit at that, Mr. Goyal is confident of putting up a better show and is very clear about the constituency he is catering to. “We are only going to approach the Hindus for their votes as all other parties are ignoring the cause and issues that affect the community,” he said.

Asked if this would lead to a split of votes between them and the Bharatiya Janata Party, Mr. Goyal said the BJP too had compromised on its Hindutva agenda and hence was no longer a viable option for the Hindu voters. “Even the BJP is after Muslim votes and has been ignoring the concerns of over 100 crore Hindus and this has led to our disenchantment with them. If the votes get divided it is their problem, not ours. We will move forward with our own agenda and go to the people.”

Both the Alliance and the Sena are yet to finalise their list of candidates.

Smaller outfits, such as the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena, have limited themselves to mobilising support for the Bharatiya Janata Party but with the main goal of boosting the prospects of Narendra Modi, the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.