On July 18, the top leaders of 26 Opposition parties joined hands to form INDIA (Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance), a coalition to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2024 general elections. The coalition plans to set up an 11-member coordination committee, prepare an action plan, and eventually work out a seat-sharing arrangement. But is seat adjustment enough for Opposition unity? Suhas Palshikar and E. Sridharan discuss this question in a conversation moderated by Sandeep Phukan. Edited excerpts:
Is seat sharing enough to keep the Opposition bloc united?
Suhas Palshikar: No, not at all. More than seat sharing, it is the resonance of their [INDIA]’s programmes and unity which will matter.
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Seat sharing is going to be a major impediment, but at the same time, it is of secondary relevance. That is because in most States, the Congress and some of the State parties are already in competition with each other, which makes seat sharing very difficult. Each party would obviously like to expand its own footprint in these respective States, and their political ambitions will come in the way of making adjustments with the other. There would be pressure from workers and also internal claimants from each party not to do seat adjustment. It is going to a tricky issue to decide for which seats there should adjustment.
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E. Sridharan: I agree. From an academic, not political, perspective, in the first-past-the-post system, a party wins by getting the single largest number of votes at the constituency level. Therefore, vote pooling becomes an imperative at the constituency level, derivatively at the State level in a federal system, and at the national level. In a pre-electoral alliance, you are making coalitions under uncertainty. Nobody knows how much strength the potential partner or the opponent has on the ground. The system rewards getting the single largest number of votes, and a party is under the imperative to ally and add to its vote pool. A small swing in votes can lead to a bigger swing in seats. In that process, ideology and principles tend to get diluted and pragmatism tends to dominate. Now, what happens in States where they already have a long-standing alliance with other parties and share seats? It is difficult to change that ratio and to get their partners to agree to contest less seats. On the other hand, in new alliances, there is flexibility. I would see such negotiations playing out in a highly contested and conflictual way across States.
These 26 parties have called themselves INDIA as they believe that the idea of India is under threat. Do they share common ideological ground or is their opposition to the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi the only glue that is holding them together?
Suhas Palshikar: There is no point in denying that the INDIA coalition has come into being mainly on the grounds of its opposition to the BJP. But at the same time, if one doesn’t understand ideology only in the orthodox sense of the term, there does exist an ideological divide now. And ironically, this ideological divide is imposed mainly because of the ideological emphasis of the BJP itself. Because the BJP has pursued a certain ideology, other parties have naturally veered towards one another and are upholding something opposite to that. They have not been able to name it yet and that is why they call themselves in vague terms as upholders of the idea of India.
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I think there is this question of exclusionary nationalism as opposed to inclusive nationalism; the idea of exclusion of certain communities as opposed to the inclusion of all in the development plank. Ideologically, this can be seen as the dividing line between the two coalitions that are emerging.
Plus, of course, the personality-centred exercise of power by the BJP gives the INDIA alliance an additional ideological advantage in becoming more diverse and less authoritarian in its approach to the questions of power. So, yes, I would argue that there is an ideological difference [between INDIA and the NDA]. The complaint would be that this ideological difference is not easily visible or comprehensible to an ordinary citizen yet.
E. Sridharan: There seems to be little ideological coherence in the Opposition beyond their opposition to the BJP. But there is also another common basis for opposition to the BJP, which is that the BJP tends to eat into the voter base of these parties in various States, threatening their viability. The BJP has grown in the northern and western States — partly on its own ideological steam and partly by eating into the base of other parties including those allied with it against the Congress at various times since its growth trajectory took off from 1989. It has done this successfully in Assam and Karnataka as well.
On some key political issues, there are marked differences. Take, for example, the Uniform Civil Code. Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena supports it, while the Left parties are against it. The Congress is yet to take a firm stand on it. Will this not confuse voters?
Suhas Palshikar: This will be an important challenge for the INDIA alliance. But also at the same time, look at what Dr. Sridharan was saying about these parties realising that this is a question of survival for them. Just as the Aam Admi Party or the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) have supported the UCC, they are also realising the virtue of a common platform, not simply because of a tactical question but also on the grounds of federalist ideology. There seem to be two or three different ideological registers operating in politics. On some of these registers, the INDIA partners are in sync with one another and on some others, they are not. Therefore, I think, they are prevaricating on the question of coming out with a common minimum programme. One may go back to the NDA that Atal Behari Vajpayee had formed in 1996. He and his colleagues in the BJP had the sagacity to keep out contentious issues and say ‘let us come together’. I think that would be the model or that should be the model for the INDIA alliance. Let us keep contentious issues aside and come together on issues on which we think there is congruence and some kind of a consensus.
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E. Sridharan: Given that they are so disparate, their views are not synchronised on many issues — fundamental issues and broad policy issues. For pre-electoral coalitions, there is no alternative but to make either compromises, or set aside or shelve some issues on which no compromise can be reached. That was the model for the Vajpayee government in 1999 when the BJP/NDA had a full term. They needed it because their coalition partners could not agree on these issues. Such pragmatic compromises are driven by the imperatives of pre-electoral coalition-building under uncertainty in a first-past-the-post system that rewards vote aggregation. Comparatively speaking, from an academic perspective, in most proportional representation systems, you get a roughly proportional seat share to your vote share even with a small vote share, so you don’t have to compromise on policy stands before elections, only at the stage of government formation.
Parliamentary elections are increasingly becoming presidential in nature. People often ask: Modi versus who? Won’t that be a handicap for the Opposition?
Suhas Palshikar: Yes and no in the sense that if they can rupture this narrative of presidential type of elections, they can easily go beyond Modi and the question ‘if not Mr. Modi, then who?’ The media is playing into the hands of the BJP and repeatedly posing this question as if it were a presidential election. The INDIA coalition will have the responsibility of not only rupturing this narrative, but also posing a narrative of programmes and performance which will push them into the reckoning against the BJP.
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E. Sridharan: I agree that elections are becoming semi-presidential in nature. The last few Lokniti-CSDS surveys showed that a third of BJP voters said that had the candidate not been Mr. Modi, they would have voted differently, indicating that the party rode on Mr. Modi’s popularity to a considerable extent. But this is not something new. In the 1971 election, Indira Gandhi was pitched against the Congress (O) which had no charismatic leader. In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi won by a three-fourths majority.
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People vote in their constituency for the candidate of the party whose leader they want to see as Prime Minister, the candidate being less important than the party, as Lokniti data shows. So, this semi-presidential character has been there for a long time. And there, the Opposition alliance seems to have a problem unless they subordinate their ambitions and back a single alternative leader. This will be a tough call as things stand now given that there are State-level rivalries between the Congress and some Opposition parties in some States. As of now they are at a disadvantage on the leadership issue given the likely semi-presidential character of the coming contest.
Suhas Palshikar taught political science at Savitribai Phule University, Pune, and is chief editor of Studies in Indian Politics; E. Sridharan is the Academic Director and Chief Executive of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India
