Sena and BJP, Congress and NCP are making for what can be described an unseemly spectacle. If they quarrel now, can they be trusted to work together later?

It is not unusual in electoral politics to remain undecided about who the candidate should be from a particular constituency, till almost the last hour of the deadline for withdrawal. More than one candidate may file, or be asked to file his or her nomination papers, and the decision is often firmed up in dying moments by party honchos.

Such tantalising intra-party dramatics are confined to a few constituencies because the choice often depends on who the rival would be. It falls in the genre of cat and mouse games. It hardly impinges on the image of the parties who opt for these knife-edge moves. It is described as matured electoral strategising.

But what his happening in Maharashtra right now, where the two major rivals do not even know if their partners for long – 25 years between the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party on one hand, and 15 years between Congress and Nationalist Congress Party – would remain with them when ballots are printed.

It is already the third day for filing the nominations and yet the alliances are unclear about remaining alliances. Like the Sena and BJP, the Congress and the NCP are making for what can be described an unseemly spectacle. If they quarrel now, can they be trusted to work together later?

For instance, take the bitterness between the NCP and Congress. After fighting the elections as rivals, and realising that together they could unseat the BJP-Sena alliance in 1999, they cobbled up a post-poll arrangement. Though they fought two subsequent elections as partners, both the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls, it was an uneasy relationship. They had a broken marriage.

While in government, they remained ill at ease, and made it clear at every available opportunity that they were less of partners and more rivals despite being in power together. They competed to put the other down, each conducting itself as an opposition to the other. It was not competitive intimacy; instead, we saw unseemly politics.

The way the BJP and the Sena are fighting for the number of seats each gets to contest has been indecorous – recall Sena speaking of how demand for too much of sex can lead to a divorce? Neither is sitting down in the bonhomie one expects of long-time allies and thrash out the seat sharing issue behind the scenes, and announce the numbers each got.

However, lamentably, they have been doing it mostly via bytes on news television.

Despite the spectacular victory in the Lok Sabha elections, it has been rubbed in, that the two parties are at unease with each other, suspecting each other's motives: Snatch the chief minister’s seat, which the Sena had always assumed would be its, if the alliance to came to power.

So terrible and unedifying is the spectacle put up by both the alliances that they give the impression that the talks are on between not steady partners but between, say Trinamool Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal. So vexed are the minor partners, like Raju Shetty and Mahado Jankar, that they even said to take their seat shares but stop the fighting.

These two small parties, Rashtriya Samaj Paksh and Swamibhani Shetkari Sanghatana with emerging clout, seem to be more conscious than the four other parties – BJP, Sena, NCP, and Congress – that the electorate is not pleased with the shenanigans. They are giving an impression of a fight for loaves and fishes, not the claimed opportunity to offer good governance.

Instead of being charged up to contest the polls with vigour, the cadre is listless because of the uncertainties. Instead of the political party's headquarters being a beehive of activity, with a surge of aspirants for tickets, one sees a deathly silence. It is going to be hard to pick up the pieces and run a blistering campaign, one alliance versus another, or even one party versus another.

At this moment, the four involved in internecine fight, seem to see the partner as a rival, and have no intention of bringing their political enemy -- the other alliance in the cross-hairs. It is going to be tough to build the campaign to a good pitch to involve the voters who are already tiring of what they see and hear. Their belief in alliance politics may have diminished.

Since there is hardly three-and-a-half weeks left for polling on October 15, and it would be single phase polling, the leaders would be hard put to cover 288 constituencies. The logistics would not work out even for well-organised parties. In the end, after a bitter pre-poll intra-alliance fight, the poll campaign itself could get toned down and candidates may be left to mostly fend for themselves.