Among all those who think seriously about democracy in India and are constantly worried about how it is imperiled, there is a sadness about how opposition parties have not been able to stick together to challenge the BJP and blazing enterprise of the Narendra Modi regime.
The frustration has been palpable especially after Nitish Kumar in Bihar swung back to join the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP. The exit of Nitish was followed by the outburst of Mamata Banerjee. Then Akhilesh Yadav unilaterally announced the number of seats he was willing to concede to the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh. If he was serious about the alliance, he would have discussed this behind closed doors. This effectively ruled out cooperation in three big states. The situation in Maharashtra, another big state, is fluid. The two big partners of the Congress there—Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray—are unsure of their support bases after their parties split.
There has also been serious confusion within the Left parties on the Congress’s role in Kerala, the only state from where the communists can make a mark after West Bengal and Tripura have slid away from their control. A report claimed the communists may field Annie Raja against Rahul Gandhi in Kerala’s Wayanad. In the rest of the South, the opposition can invest hope in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In Karnataka and Telangana, they are likely to be met with a formidable challenge. Amid this confusion that exists, in his motion of thanks to the president’s address on Monday, Modi took potshots at the ‘broken alignment’ of opposition alliance.
In August 2023, the Congress’s communication head Jairam Ramesh had said that the INDIA confluence was “conceptually different” from the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that the Congress had earlier led. But he spoke about conceptual difference in a very narrow sense. He simply said while INDIA was a pre-poll pact, the UPA was a post-poll one. As the months passed, the real conceptual differences within the alliance unraveled.
It appeared to many regional parties that the Congress was encroaching on their trademark conceptual areas—for instance, Mandal politics (demanding a national caste census was one of its expressions) and federalism. After all, the regional parties had carved their political space at the expense of the Congress on these two aspects besides others. Now they did not want to revive the Congress to jeopardise their own survival. The smugness of the Congress and its moral condescension further irritated the allies. A trust deficit and lack of sincerity drove a deeper wedge.
After its victory in Karnataka last May, till assembly polls were held to five other legislatures in November, the Congress put alliance talks and strategy meetings in the cold storage. This was perhaps in anticipation of a better bargaining clout for seats within the alliance. When the results in December went bust for the party, it did not seem to have an alliance plan B. What had also perhaps scared the Congress was that many of its allies had openly advocated that it should only fight the seats in which they were in direct contest with the BJP in 2019. That would mean roughly 200-plus seats. This must have appeared to the party as an indirect attempt by its allies to reduce its national imprint. Leaders like Nitish had even advocated one opposition candidate in one seat. The last nail was the second leg of Rahul Gandhi’s cross-country walk, the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. It made it clear to the allies that the Congress was not serious about either the alliance or the electoral game.
During the short period when the opposition alliance looked alive, if people thought they stood together for secular politics then it was a simplistic deduction. The opposition has been defined more by a negative agenda than a positive one. It was the exact mistake they made in 1971, when they wanted Indira Gandhi out—the slogan was ‘Indira hatao (Remove Indira)’. The Congress had smartly turned it around to say ‘Garibi hatao (Get rid of poverty)’. Modi has played a somewhat similar card. As much as the opposition has made it about his ‘authoritarian’ and ‘narcissistic’ traits, he has increasingly invoked the nation, its civilisational self-esteem and economic glory. He has made himself look like the chosen one to return the nation to an imagined golden era in the past.
The opposition has always worked on a diet of boycotts that cannot be read as conceptual unity. If one took their lip service to secularism seriously, then it was blown away when their response to the Ram temple in Ayodhya was muted. The Congress took a fortnight to arrive at a ‘principled’ stand against attending the consecration. If there was conceptual clarity, they would have refused the invite instantly like the communists did. Later, the Congress welcomed the nation’s highest civilian award for L K Advani. This was a paradoxical position because it was Advani who had permanently shifted the secular alignment of the nation with the temple movement in 1990.
People who desire opposition unity always want the grouping to look homogenous, like the ruling party or ruling coalition. But that has never been possible, because those in power either are held together by a set of ideas, use power as a glue, or rely on both. Whenever the opposition has tried to come together, it has been a gathering of disparate ideas in a rather clumsy fashion. This was true about 1967, 1971, 1977 or 1989 polls. Socialists, communists, libertarians, federalists and the Hindu right came together in the past not because they believed in something common, but they desperately wanted to see the Congress out of power. Each time they came together, things fell apart without a centre to hold.
A little before and after the 1967 polls, there was an omnibus opposition formula advocated by socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia. The ‘Lohia line’ meant that everybody, including the extreme right and the extreme left, should come together to replace the Congress in state legislatures where no single opposition party was in a position to do so. Those at the extreme ends of the ideological pole had bought into this and only temporarily blurred the lines for the sake of power.
Sugata Srinivasaraju
Senior journalist and author of Strange Burdens: The politics and predicaments of Rahul Gandhi