Is the leadership role in the national opposition space open again?
This question has resurfaced after TMC chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee expressed her willingness to lead the opposition INDIA bloc, stating her dissatisfaction with its functioning. Alliance partners such as Sharad Pawar of the NCP (SP) and Lalu Prasad of the RJD endorsed her and Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah said “leadership has to be earned”.
This is on the lines of the pre-Lok Sabha polls scenario, with regional stalwarts vying to be the national alternative, a position which Congress views itself as the pre-eminent occupant for.
But it isn’t surprising that the leadership debate within the bloc has resurfaced after poll setbacks to the Congress in Haryana and Maharashtra, and its dull show as second fiddle in Jammu and Kashmir and Jharkhand. These poll reverses seem to have put to an end a period of relative quiet since the Lok Sabha poll results as the Congress’s tally of 99 seats had lent some semblance of weight to its leadership of the bloc, which had done relatively well with 232 seats.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge was appointed INDIA bloc chief in January amid speculation about others’ claims over the position. Amid the key contenders then were leaders who had set the formation of the alliance in motion – JDU president and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar, who later left the bloc to join the NDA, and Mamata Banerjee.
Murmurs of discontent and internal differences weren’t unexpected in a bloc of more than two dozen parties. That was most clearly evident, for instance, as the seat-sharing negotiations ran into rough weather in many states. In fact, the seat-sharing talks couldn’t materialise at all in West Bengal, where TMC went alone to win 29 of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in the state against BJP’s 12, while Congress allied with the CPM-led Left Front to win only one seat, and the Left couldn’t get any. The Lok Sabha results had brought only a moratorium on the internal tussle for leadership. That phase now seems to be wearing off.
The recent election in Haryana was pitched as a face-off between two national parties, and the Maharashtra polls as contests between the state versions of the Congress-led INDIA bloc and BJP-led NDA. But the Congress’s failures have given one more reason for disgruntled allies to question its ability to take on the BJP, its principal opponent and the party in power at the centre for more than a decade now.
Within the realm of the alliance’s common objective, this critique of the Congress leadership becomes important because anti-BJPism – just how anti- Congressism took the form of an ideology in the seventies – is the rallying point for alliance partners. That is what TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee alluded to while appealing to Congress and other allies to make way for Mamata Banerjee the national leader of the bloc.
The electoral philosophy of the bloc was to let Congress have a say where it can directly fight the BJP, and leave the regional strongholds for the regional parties. In doing so, Congress incurred the risk of admitting to its diminished stature as an all-India force, and undervaluing its presence as the only national force in the bloc.
In the last few years, Congress’s dilemma has centred around this messaging of primacy in the opposition space of national politics, and balancing it with its commonality of interests with regional political forces.
Over the last few years, this anxiety has also been seen in the subtext of Congress showcasing its electoral seriousness and poll preparedness. The need for this was felt because its sloppy and sluggish approach to electoral planning and organisational weaknesses were being faulted in the opposition camp. The party made it a point to show its sense of electoral intent.
A case in point is how in 2022, while having strategy sessions with a poll consultant, the party didn’t make it a point to keep it under wraps. The reasoning wasn’t far to seek. By all indications, the move was shaped by the need to send the message that the party is serious about trying out all means to be the national challenger to the incumbent BJP in the next general election. This was pitched as an assertion of its primacy as the national alternative, or at least the pivot of such an alternative, at a time when it was being written off as a national force of consequence.
In a way, such political messaging from the Congress was driven by the realisation that the party must be seen as fighting and equipping itself with a larger plan for the battle. More significantly, the party realised that a long spell of being written off as a spent force, and with no road to recovery in sight, may mean that, in the public mind, an array of strong regional forces or smaller parties will grab the mantle as key challenger to the BJP-led NDA.
If Congress’s approach was driven by this reasoning, the regional allies had their doubts about the Congress’s presence as the pivot. Most of these allies trace their origin to anti-Congress fronts at one point or the other, and later when some of them became allies in Congress-led UPA, they carried their share of doubts about Congress top brass’s domineering ways. In the reconfigured political equations, some of these doubts linger, and at the same time, the aspirations of regional satraps to find their foothold in national politics are evident, more so in the unsettled opposition space.
Amid mixed signals from allies, the INDIA bloc’s leadership is set to become a contested turf again. Besides clear expression of interest from TMC to lead the bloc, the AAP’s refusal to ally with Congress in Haryana earlier and now in Delhi polls has also come at a time when Congress’s hopes of a resurgence have fizzled out.
Divergent voices aren’t unusual in such a large alliance of disparate political players. But the commonality of political interests can still tie them to acting in concert in opposition space, if the leadership is trusted to find a ground of clinching convergence. In that context, the INDIA bloc will have to navigate rival leadership claims delicately, if it has to avoid becoming a rudderless ragbag.
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