Downsizing Oppn in M’rashtra & beyond

No healthy democracy can exist without a vigorous Opposition. Modern democracies are unthinkable without Opposition parties and healthy competition between them. In Britain, Labour Party leader Kier Starmer and some Tory MPs had accused PM Boris Johnson of breaking Covid rules with parties held in Downing Street during the lockdown and thus holding the British public in contempt, but they were not accused of being anti-national or acting against national interest. In fact, in most established democracies, it is Opposition parties that try to prevent the government from running roughshod by constraining and restricting it. But in India, the Opposition cannot play this crucial role as the ruling party routinely denies the legitimacy of political opponents, glaringly evident from the explicit objective of ‘Congress-free India’, now upscaled to ‘Opposition-free India’.

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One of the hallmarks of the ruling party strategy over the years has been the constant denigration of the Congress party. Even after eight years in power, the BJP seems to excel in targeting the Congress to project itself as the only alternative. The BJP’s national executive meeting at Hyderabad last week was again dominated by Opposition bashing, highlighted in the overarching theme of dynasty which symbolises various other ills too, from casteism to regionalism to appeasement. Over two days, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders kept targeting the Opposition parties, suggesting that the sole problem in the country is the Opposition. However, this time the target wasn’t the Congress, but regional parties, which are mostly family-ruled. The repeated attack on dynastic parties in Hyderabad was a pointed attempt to censure regional parties which are the principal opposition to its expansion in the south and the east.

Downsizing the Opposition has been a central goal of the BJP ever since it won an absolute majority in 2014. By 2017,

60 per cent of the political space was already occupied by the BJP but Amit Shah declared at the national executive meeting in April that year that ‘we cannot sit idle, resting on our laurels…We have to pledge that the BJP should be there from the panchayats to Parliament. Every state should see this, in every state, we have to take the BJP to power. Once we achieve that, we can say that the BJP’s golden era has come.’

The disdain for the Opposition was reflected in the first term itself in the Speaker’s refusal to recognise the chief of the Congress legislative party as the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and in refusing to engage in debates with the Opposition in Parliament. During the second term, it relied on various other tactics to capture power in states even when election results didn’t favour the ruling party. This resulted in several attempts to dislodge Congress governments from power at the state level without imposing President’s rule. The extravagant use of money power and the weaponisation of Central agencies has played a critical role in cornering opposition legislators and in bringing them into their fold.

Electoral bonds have played a lead role in this drama. The bulk of the electoral bonds have gone to the ruling party further boosting the financial heft of the richest party in India. The enormous money in its coffers helps to finance its massive election campaigns and also comes in handy in toppling elected governments by luring away MLAs. It is worth noting that most non-BJP governments have fallen after the introduction of electoral bonds in 2017. Evidently, electoral bonds can facilitate these transactions.

In state after state, non-BJP governments were toppled when legislators of the parties in power were induced to defect or resign their seats, so that the BJP could form the government instead. The Congress government fell in Karnataka as 15 legislators left the ruling alliance which had necessitated a no-confidence motion. Subsequently, the BJP went on to form the government, barely a year after the JD (S)-Congress alliance had come to power. The state governments in Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Goa and Manipur, also fell more or less in the same way, giving way to ones by the BJP. This tally has gone up to eight states, including Maharashtra which is the latest to fall.

The dramatic fall of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), the tripartite alliance of the Shiv Sena, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) was engineered through large-scale defections and breaking of the Shiv Sena, giving an upper hand to the BJP in state politics. This was the prime objective from the day the MVA government was formed as the BJP was not reconciled to the loss of an important state, along with Mumbai, the country’s financial capital. Several attempts were made in the past two years to dislodge the MVA government. This time, it succeeded. Eknath Shinde’s rebellion provided the opening to unseat the Uddhav Thackeray government.

The last episode of this unsavoury saga was a long-drawn-out one. It involved five-star hotel stays in three BJP-ruled states and using governments in Gujarat and Assam to abet the revolt and the tactical deployment of the Central agencies to wheedle its collapse. The events also revealed the role of the Supreme Court in the disqualification issue and the Governor’s part in fixing the date for the election of the Speaker within two days of a new regime taking over even as he had been refusing to do the same after the resignation of Nana Patole, citing pendency of litigation in the court. These crafty manoeuvres have eroded the Shiv Sena’s primacy in state politics and paved the way for the emergence of the BJP as the real flag-bearer of Hindutva.

The collapse of the MVA is undoubtedly a big setback to the Opposition because Maharashtra is an extremely important state as mentioned above, which apart from its economic clout, sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha. Moreover, the alliance between ideologically disparate parties was a test case for a nationwide arrangement to stall the BJP. The alliance was doing well and could not be accused of misgovernance. In fact, if it had lasted its full term, it could well have shut the doors on the BJP and its majoritarian belligerence in a keystone state, but the rebellion in Shiv Sena ranks scuppered it.

The fall of the MVA government has underlined the seemingly insurmountable challenges facing the Opposition in tackling the BJP. But it has also raised concerns about the political implications of dislodging governments in ways that stop at nothing. This approach can undermine democracy and accountability towards other actors outside the ruling party. It can also erode the institutional checks on executive power necessary for a durable democracy. Dislodging governments through various means is a facet of authoritarianism which is inherent in the majoritarian project. This entails political expansionism at all costs which can endanger democracy as it denies the possibility of a pluralist society, and transforms politics into a no-holds-barred electoral contest. Acquisition of power through methods which are anti-democratic by their very nature are in fact threats to democracy, especially when it entails a rejection of the notion of pluralism and embrace of cultural exclusion.

Dislodging Opposition-led state governments is among the many forms by which democratic erosion is taking place on the streets, in the courts, and in institutions. Democracy requires a strong Opposition but the current dispensation is not very keen on having an Opposition, leave alone a strong one. It is working overtime to achieve an Opposition-free India.