The elections due next year are shaping up to be the most personality-driven one since the 1989 polls that centred around VP Singh and Rajiv Gandhi. And as the hashtag – #NaMo – becomes a proper noun with each passing rally and political address--you got to be either with him or against him we are told by netas  of all political persuasions--the self-declared non-Congress, non-BJP parties sat down for a bit of brainstorming themselves.

The venue was New Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium, and the date was October 30 – a day after Gujarat chief minister and BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi' s reported “face-off” with prime minister on which party can rightfully inherit Sardar Patel’s legacy, and a day before he was to lay the foundation stone for a 183-metre statue of Vallabhbhai Patel, said to be the tallest of its kind once finished.

At the indoor stadium, the line was clear, and it was the aforesaid – you got to be either with him or against him. Leaders of all 14 parties assembled were, of course, on the latter side of the fence and, as if to honour the venue, did some verbal fencing in an effort to show whose sabre shows sharper teeth against a largely unnamed and equally vague enemy: communalism, with no difference between the kind pursued in favour of the majority and the minorities, or along caste, linguistic and regional lines.

While Nitish Kumar, the Bihar CM and key Modi baiter, said the time has not come “as of today” to talk about an alternative front, the fact that only the CPI(M) and CPI took on the Gujarat CM directly, with the other eleven parties hedging their bets and keeping quiet even on the Congress, the meet – officially dubbed “convention of people’s unity against communalism” – can only be seen as an effort to find their footing on a fast-changing political pitch.
Nitish, to whom the Congress has unwittingly ceded the post of chief anti-Modi speaker, as Rahul and Sonia Gandhi avoid any direct verbal duel with the Gujarat CM, took a few punches at Modi without naming him. But he, too, seemed to be caught between vagueness and obfuscation, using analogies like fascism and terrorism to define the Modi march.

What no one, least of all the convention participants themselves missed was the fact that most of these parties, barring the Left and Sharad Pawar-led NCP, have partnered the BJP in the past: Nitish’s JD(U), Naveen Patnaik’s BJD, Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK, the Asom Gana Parishad, among others. The AIADMK representative, in fact, made no remark against either Modi or the BJP, keeping to a trite secularism-is-good line.

More glaring was the list of absentees among the key non-NDA parties: the BSP, Trinamool Congress, DMK and Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal. Barring DMK, all three are expected to up teir seat share in the next Lok Sabha, with Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool expected to make a further dent in the Left parties' pride.

With political leaders using the occasion to justify why they cannot go with the BJP – “as of today”, a caveat Nitish Kumar used in a different context – the meet lost the opportunity for a genuine and serious brainstorming on whether an alternative front of regional players is possible. And if yes, how different its socio-economic and political prescription could be from the ruling and main opposition party.