“A grand alliance against a Modi-led BJP is desirable but I am not sure it is feasible..” a senior INDIA alliance leader in June 2023.
Those cautionary words from a veteran politician have proven to be prophetic. Just over 18 months after a disparate gathering of leaders came together in the summer heat of Patna to forge an unlikely anti-BJP grouping, the alliance has quickly unraveled. The INDIA alliance is almost dead, only the last rites need to be performed, most likely once the high stakes Delhi assembly elections are done and dusted.
In a sense, there is a certain inevitability to the script that is playing out. An alliance that was formed only to stall the Modi ‘char sau par’ juggernaut was never going to endure once the 2024 general elections were over. With Modi back in the prime ministerial seat, albeit with vastly reduced numbers, state-level compulsions have taken over from national priorities. Did anyone seriously expect Mamata Banerjee and the Left to find any meeting ground in Bengal? Could Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar, friends turned foes turned ‘frenemies’ in Bihar have ever really trusted each other? Were Omar Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti going to stay on the same side in a battle for supremacy in the Kashmir Valley? And for how long could the Shiv Sena (Uddhav faction) harmonise its not so distant militant Hindutva past with its more nebulous present? Narendra Modi and the BJP were the common enemy for a national election but in a state battle, the equations were bound to change.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Delhi. Eight months ago, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) fought the Lok Sabha elections in alliance in the national capital even while taking each other on in Punjab. It was an uneasy combination, seeking to benefit from political arithmetic but singularly devoid of any chemistry. After all, as a political start-up, the AAP rose on the debris of the Congress party in Delhi. It was Arvind Kejriwal’s India Against Corruption campaign in 2011 that enfeebled the Manmohan Singh government and created an anti-establishment mood for the BJP to capitalize upon in the 2014 general elections. It was Kejriwal who humbled a three-time Congress chief minister , Sheila Dikshit in 2013, eventually forming a government in Delhi for the first time with outside support from the Congress. A grand old party surrendering primacy to a political newbie, the decline of the Congress in the national capital was rapid. The party hasn’t won a single seat in Delhi in a decade since.
Which is why it is no surprise that the Delhi Congress has chosen to now chart its own path. A fraught history leaves its inescapable scars behind. What is surprising though is just how there has been so little effort from either side to even try and find common ground. Instead, we are witnessing a spiraling war of words that can only provide more comfort to the BJP. Ironically, it was as recently as September 2024 when Rahul Gandhi had reportedly green flagged an alliance with AAP for the Haryana assembly elections. However, the state Congress, supremely confident of winning the elections, sabotaged alliance overtures. Now, with the Congress having lost the Haryana and Maharashtra elections, the party is in no position to call the shots. This time, it is Kejriwal’s turn to play ‘ekla chalo re’ politics, the AAP even going to the extent of asking for the Congress to be ‘thrown out’ of the INDIA alliance. Without the Congress, the only pan-Indian party within the alliance, there is no force large enough to act as a magnet to settle internal contradictions.
In hindsight, individual egos and ambitions are at such cross-purposes that it is astonishing that an INDIA alliance was even attempted in the first instance. Nitish Kumar, the original proponent of the alliance was also the first to opt out, his hope of being made the convenor of the grouping being vetoed by his peers. Mamata Banerjee, who has never forgiven the Congress for tieing up with the Left in Bengal, will not play second fiddle to a Rahul Gandhi, someone she views as decidedly a political junior. And the Congress leadership, a section of which was carried away by its 99 Lok Sabha seats and remains oblivious to ground realities, still sees itself as a natural party of power. Sharad Pawar, the one leader who might have played the role of coalition-builder, is now 84 and after the Maharashtra defeat and the break-up of his party, doesn’t have the political heft left to mend differences within.
But there is a lesson in the collapse of the INDIA alliance that goes beyond its stakeholders. In the last decade, the rise of Modi has created the spectre of the country being pushed towards a single party, single leader ‘elected autocracy’. It is the fear of being totally marginalized that brought the opposition together. But this grouping had little in common beyond visceral anti-Modiism. Just like the Janata Party experiment in the 1970s was kickstarted by a desire to get rid of Indira Gandhi at all costs, the INDIA alliance emerged out of an obsessive Modi fixation. However, oppositional politics cannot survive on short-fix prescriptions devoid of any ideological moorings. The Janata Party lasted just over two years, the INDIA alliance has had an even shorter innings. At least, the Janata Party had the towering persona of Jayaprakash Narayan to guide it for a while; the INDIA alliance hasn’t had the enlightened leadership nor even a common minimum agenda to shape its trajectory.
The INDIA alliance’s demise would suggest that the BJP is back to where it was at the start of 2024, a dominant force that will simply bulldoze any opposition to its ascendancy. For democratic-spirited citizens, a divided opposition must be of grave concern, especially given the tendency of the Modi government to use institutional power to constantly push its opponents on the defensive. The 2024 general elections had opened a small window of hope that politics would now see a more level playing field contestation between the NDA government and its political rivals within and outside parliament. The rapid implosion of the INDIA alliance implies a possible return to a more bruising politics where a domineering government will be tempted to flex its muscles once again in crushing all dissenting voices. An ‘opposition mukt Bharat’ is not what India needs.
