INDIA’s diffident moves bode ill for its prospects

Radhika Ramaseshan

Senior Journalist

WEST BENGAL, Maharashtra, Bihar, Jharkhand, Punjab and Delhi are regarded as the only states north of the Vindhyas which can potentially see a fairly balanced contest between the BJP-helmed NDA and the Opposition’s INDIA bloc. Combined, this sextet accounts for 30 per cent of the Lok Sabha seats in the country. Hence, their importance cannot be emphasised enough in a landscape where the Congress exists as dots on a vast and dominant swath of the Hindi heartland.

Make no mistake: the Congress is a junior partner in the Opposition-ruled Bihar and Jharkhand governments, besides the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance, which was briefly in power in Maharashtra. The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) or SS (UBT) and the Nationalist Congress Party —the main prongs of the MVA — Bihar’s Rashtriya Janata Dal and Janata Dal (United), Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) shore up INDIA, with the Congress being an equal stakeholder. The fact is if the regional constituents swim, the Congress stays afloat; if they sink, it drowns. Forget being a force multiplier, in these states, on its own, the Congress offers paltry remittances to INDIA’s balance sheet because it has not raised local leaders, has a shrunken mass base and a weak organisational setup.

Yet, the Congress has brought out bargaining chips in some of the states as though it is in the driver’s seat. At INDIA’s meeting on December 19, TMC’s Mamata Banerjee and SS (UBT)’s Uddhav Thackeray stressed the significance of firming up seat distribution before 2023 ended as a sine qua non for the coalition’s survival and credibility. SS (UBT) sources said while the Congress agreed ‘in principle’, in practice the negotiations were more arduous than what the MVA imagined. The Congress was apparently the source of the problem. The Congress’s contention was that after the SS (UBT) and NCP were sliced up by the BJP, which spirited away a large number of MLAs and some MPs in 2022, the legislative strength of these parties stood diminished, while the Congress remained intact and had thus become the largest Opposition party in Maharashtra. Therefore, it merited a greater share of the parliamentary seats than its allies were willing to concede. On the other hand, the SS (UBT) argued that the Congress must begin from scratch. The Congress, which had won only one Lok Sabha seat in the state in 2019, faced a jolt when its MP passed away last year. As a result, the process of seat-sharing is in deep freeze.

Bihar is knotty, not because of the Congress, but due to the emergence of serious friction between the JD(U) and RJD over alleged machinations to unseat Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister and install Tejashwi Yadav, his deputy from the RJD. Nitish suspected his long-time factotum, Rajiv Ranjan Singh, alias Lalan, of ‘conspiring’ with the RJD, quickly sacked him as the JD(U) president and installed himself. If there was a grain of truth in Nitish’s suspicions — and possibly there was more than that, given Yadav’s panic reaction that forced him to call off an official visit to Australia — it reflected poorly on the RJD and JD(U)’s misadventure months before the Lok Sabha election, considering that they were reasonably well placed to fight the BJP with a consolidated backward caste following.

At the heart of the Bihar churn lay a matter that bedevilled INDIA from its inception and looked insolvable till the last — the question of leadership. Nitish has scarcely concealed his ambition to head the bloc as a convener which he believed was only a few steps away from declaring him as the Opposition’s PM candidate. The Congress refused to fill in the blanks while Banerjee and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal checkmated Nitish’s game plan by insisting in INDIA’s last meeting that Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge should be named and projected as the PM face by virtue of being a Dalit and a Hindi-speaking Southerner.

Banerjee and Kejriwal’s counter-move would have obviously discomfited the Gandhis. To date, Rahul Gandhi has not ruled himself out as a contender for the country’s top job — a prospect the BJP loved because nothing suited the party more than a Rahul-Narendra Modi duel.

In West Bengal, Banerjee, who made the strongest pitch for a one-on-one contest between INDIA and BJP, was clear that the TMC will go solo. Why is her state an exception? Because the TMC alone could ‘teach’ the BJP ‘a lesson’. The BJP has not de-escalated the combativeness it displayed in 2019 even after it suffered a defeat in the ensuing Assembly elections. If the Left Front has to register its presence, it will have to be doubly belligerent to demonstrate it was the TMC’s principal adversary. So much for INDIA’s ability to hang together and challenge the BJP.

Amid the Opposition’s inept moves on the political chessboard, Rahul will embark on the second edition of his yatra, christened as the Bharat Nyay Yatra, from January 14. His peregrination will encompass the east and parts of the north before concluding in the west. Internally, the Congress agreed that Rahul’s Bharat Jodo Yatra did not yield the expected returns, except perhaps in Karnataka and Telangana where the success was also largely pivoted around the local leaders. Questions are being raised about the expenses the yatra would entail months before the Congress faced a resource-rich BJP, and whether the costs would commensurately bring in benefits, at least this time.

Above all, is Rahul’s journey meant to reaffirm his pre-eminence in INDIA amid the competing claims made by the leaders of the other constituents?

Summing up, INDIA has not wrapped its head around a vital facet of electioneering — crafting a narrative. The stated objective of Rahul’s yatra is to draw people’s attention to the ‘political, social and economic injustice’, protection against which was envisaged by the Constitution. However, will the medium and the message get overwhelmed by incomprehensible abstractions?

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