The new moniker for the Opposition alliance, INDIA, made its debut in the Monsoon Session of Parliament, both as nomenclature and as a working system for parliamentary solidarity, with the NDA’s response to it being calibrated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi both in closed door meetings with NDA MPs and during his speech on the no-confidence motion moved against his government by the Opposition.
Message to NDA
Throughout the Monsoon Session of Parliament, NDA MPs divided into region-wise clusters of 30-35 members met with Mr. Modi and senior members of the Union Cabinet, to work out a cohesion in terms of messaging in the 38-member alliance. In fact, on the last day of the Monsoon Session the BJP’s media cell organised a workshop for NDA MPs for the same purpose.
What was the message that Mr. Modi was giving out to NDA MPs?
Some messages were of the generic, tactical kind, like advising MPs to hire social media managers to tackle the information war over WhatsApp, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) that is to come with the poll season, as well as to refer to INDIA group as the “Ghamandia Gathbandhan” (arrogant alliance). Other messages were far more diffused, the biggest being one that PM Modi said to MPs from the Northeast, that the NDA was a reliable alliance for 25 years running and it had evolved “organically” and that INDIA group was “hardly noteworthy” and that it was an “assembled unit” trying to unite.
To another group of MPs he said that NDA was reliable, and that BJP itself was a “good partner” which had ceded the chief ministership to Janata Dal (United) [JD(U)] leader Nitish Kumar when in alliance in Bihar despite the fact that BJP had more seats in the Assembly than Mr. Kumar’s party. BJP was projected as a force for stability in governance, a powerful argument anywhere. The need for an NDA despite a full majority for the BJP in Parliament was painted as an organic instinct for accommodation of interests.
Looking at the past
It was however, in his speech on Thursday, that Mr. Modi revealed the more aggressive part of the strategy to highlight the various points at which INDIA partners could differ.
As a warning to the regional and socialist parties coalescing around the Congress, a party that they used to oppose tooth and nail in the past, Mr. Modi dug out issues where these parties were in an adversarial position to the Congress.
Targeting the DMK, the ruling party in Tamil Nadu, the PM asked about the Katchatheevu islands, and “who gave it away”. He remarked that even now he received letters from DMK leaders to initiate some way of retrieving the island. The island, located between Rameswaram in India and Sri Lanka, was traditionally used by both Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen. In 1974, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi accepted Katchatheevu as Sri Lankan territory under the “Indo-Sri Lankan Maritime agreement”.
Mizo National Front (MNF), part of the NDA but alienated because of the ongoing violence in Manipur, was reminded by PM Modi of the 1966 bombing of Mizoram by the Indian Air Force by the Indira Gandhi-led government, an example of allowing problems to fester and then reacting with excessive military force that he said also led to the military operation on the Akal Takht in Amritsar in 1984. The contrast he wanted to draw was his own party’s handling of the Northeast and other problem spots.
For the “heirs of Ram Manohar Lohia” as Mr. Modi referred to the socialist parties of JD(U) and the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), he spoke of the late socialist leader Lohia’s belief that late PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s Northeast policy was of “careless neglect” and was “dangerous”.
Alliances are made up of complimentary interests, and Mr. Modi tried to attack the circumstances around the contemporary complementarity of the INDIA bloc, drawing the contest in 2024 as a straight fight between the two alliances.
