Three years after the Opposition came together with an ambitious plan to turn the INDIA bloc into a cohesive electoral force, the grouping is once again confronting the limits of an alliance held together largely by state-level arrangements.
The bloc’s 14-member coordination committee, envisaged as its highest decision-making body, met only once, on September 13, 2023, at the residence of NCP founder Sharad Pawar in Delhi. It never met again.
The committee was tasked with, among other things, coordinating campaigns and expediting seat-sharing talks. But even its first meeting could not set the mechanism in motion. A proposed joint rally in Bhopal was dropped, while negotiations over seat-sharing dragged on for months.
Three years later, two members of the original committee, Raghav Chadha of the AAP and Lalan Singh of the JD(U), are now in the BJP-led NDA camp.
There was an attempt this year to revive a measure of national-level coordination. At a meeting of Opposition leaders on June 8, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said the parties would meet every two months. A proposed meeting in Hyderabad in August, however, did not materialise.
“We are waiting for the Congress to pick a date for the meeting. There is no word from them on why the Hyderabad meeting did not materialise,” a senior Opposition leader told PTI. A senior Congress leader said he had no information on the matter.
The absence of a central forum has become more consequential as relations among the bloc’s constituents have shifted. Ahead of the 2027 Assembly elections, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Manipur present a complicated map in which former allies are rivals in some States and potential partners in others.
The AAP, which left the INDIA bloc last year, is now locked in a sharp contest with the Congress in Punjab. In Goa, it has joined hands with the Goa Forward Party to build a non-BJP, non-Congress alternative, while it is preparing to contest Gujarat on its own.
Even alliances that delivered electoral gains have not remained free of friction. The JMM-Congress-RJD combine retained power in Jharkhand in 2024, while the Congress and National Conference contested the Jammu and Kashmir election together. Yet Congress leaders in Jharkhand have repeatedly raised concerns over representation and coordination, while relations between the Congress and the NC have come under strain over power-sharing.
The differences surfaced again this month over the rendition of the full version of Vande Mataram at a government-backed event, with the NC hitting back at the Congress.
In Tamil Nadu, one of the bloc’s more durable partnerships has also undergone a dramatic change ahead of the 2026 Assembly election, with the Congress leaving the DMK-led front and joining the ruling TVK-led alliance.
The INDIA bloc’s loose structure was, in some ways, its strength during the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Instead of imposing a uniform formula, parties largely worked out arrangements based on State-specific equations.
The strategy paid off in Uttar Pradesh, where the SP-Congress alliance won 43 of the 80 seats, and in Maharashtra, where Opposition parties won 30 of 48 seats. The DMK-led alliance also swept Tamil Nadu.
Overall, INDIA parties won 234 Lok Sabha seats. But the same flexibility produced sharply uneven outcomes elsewhere, with constituents fighting separately in West Bengal and Punjab and the bloc performing poorly in Bihar, Gujarat and Delhi.
The subsequent Assembly elections exposed those fault lines further. The Opposition suffered a major setback in Maharashtra; the Congress and AAP failed to reach an understanding in Haryana and Delhi; and Opposition parties faced each other in Kerala and West Bengal.
In Uttar Pradesh, the SP and Congress have reiterated that their alliance will continue for the Assembly election. But negotiating over 403 Assembly seats is likely to be considerably more difficult than sharing 80 Lok Sabha seats.
The bloc has shown that it can still come together when confronted with common national issues. Its constituents jointly wrote to the Chief Justice of India on the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and coordinated in Parliament, including to defeat the delimitation-linked Constitution Amendment Bill.
Yet the absence of a standing coordination mechanism leaves little room to mediate when State-level interests collide.
Three years after its sole meeting, the committee that was meant to give the INDIA bloc a collective political direction has disappeared from the picture. What remains is an alliance that has proved capable of tactical cooperation, but whose cohesion continues to be tested by the very State-level politics that helped it succeed in the first place.
(With inputs from PTI)
