New Delhi: Barely a day had passed since his return to India from diplomatic visits and Prime Minister Narendra Modi trained his guns on the opposition parties and their efforts to join ranks against the BJP ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. At a congregation of the BJP’s booth-level workers in Bhopal on Tuesday, Modi equated the opposition parties’ attempts to create a united front as the coming together of “corrupt” forces who are eyeing a shot at power only to avoid imprisonment for their alleged involvement in various scams.
The BJP is clearly preparing to launch an all-out campaign to brand the united opposition front that is beginning to take a concrete shape as corrupt. Modi indicated in Bhopal that the saffron party will paint the opposition front as a group of self-serving political dynasties.
By pointing at the two-fold strategy to discredit the opposition, however, Modi appears to have erased his party’s own history in creating and participating in similar opposition fronts over the last five decades. In all such instances, the BJP portrayed those coalitions as ideological fronts to take on an autocratic and corrupt regime of the time.
It was during the Emergency between 1975 and 1977, when democratic rights were suspended, that the BJP’s former avatar – the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – sought refuge in the biggest opposition front India has ever seen. The Janata Party was an unprecedented experiment in which parties across the political spectrum who were opposed to the Indira Gandhi-led Congress regime came together. The Socialists, a significant section of the Communists, and centre-right parties like the Jana Sangh came together to challenge the Congress. It wasn’t their ideological affiliations but the immediate political realities of the time that brought them together. The parties could reserve their differences and find a common cause to join ranks.
Similarly, the 1989 V.P. Singh-led National Front government was yet another similar coalition that appeared incompatible but was bound by its anti-Congressism. The Left and the Right both joined hands together to espouse the leadership of the socialist V.P. Singh, who had rebelled against the Congress. The Congress was under severe public scrutiny for the Bofors defence scandal. The BJP, close on the heels of the Ram Janmabhoomi Rath Yatra, supported the National Front government, and some believe that the decision was one of the reasons that brought the BJP to the forefront of Indian electoral politics.
Pre- and post-poll coalitions have been a norm in India, necessitated by the political realities of the time. The BJP has partnered with multiple political players from time to time to form governments, both in the states and at the Centre. Many former BJP allies are now severe critics of the Modi government and are actively involved in the talks to forge some sort of opposition unity. Nitish Kumar, the Bihar chief minister, who has been instrumental in bringing the opposition together, was until recently a part of the BJP-led NDA. Similarly, the BJP also allied with Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party leader Mehbooba Mufti Sayeed to form a coalition government a few years ago. Uddhav Thackeray, too, was a former ally. Most corruption charges against these leaders, if any, existed even when the BJP decided to ally with them.
The fact remains that the BJP under the leadership of Modi has lost the trust of its most-important allies, many of whom have joined the united opposition talks now. There have been several junctures during the last nine years when opposition ranks were forced to unite in the Parliament to be even heard. Bills were passed autocratically. Opposition leaders have been put under military-level surveillance. Many of them were put under the scanner by the Modi government, even as many tainted BJP leaders remained scot-free. The selective nature of the Modi government’s politics and policies has remained a topic of discussion for over nine years now.
Political observers will agree that if at all a united opposition front takes a concrete shape, it will be largely credited to the Modi-led BJP’s efforts to take hegemonic control over public institutions and the Indian federal structure. Many non-BJP governments have consistently accused the Centre of interfering in their governance through different mechanisms. It is for the first time in Indian history that the governor’s offices have become blatantly partisan in favour of the BJP.
Like previous instances in India’s political history, the attempts of the opposition to come together against what they believe is a despotic Centre is a political reality that needs to be understood in its context, and not by what the BJP or Modi claims. By dismissing the united opposition as corrupt and self-serving, the prime minister may have used a deflectionary tool to bury his own political mistakes that have escalated the BJP’s challenges in 2024.
The opposition alliance may appear incompatible, but the parties have shown a resolve to bury their differences at the moment and move forward with a common minimum agenda. The experiment may or may not be successful – but it will surely lodge a dent in the BJP’s hegemonic presence.
As recently as May, the BJP was rejected by the electorate primarily on the grounds of massive corruption plaguing the working of its Karnataka government led by Basavaraj Bommai. The election campaign in the southern state echoed with slogans like “40% sarkara” (40% commission government) and “PayCM”, both of which pointed to the widespread scandals during the Bommai government. The Karnataka mandate that brought the Congress to power was an outright rejection of the BJP and sullied the saffron party’s constant projection of itself as the only political force to deliver corruption-free governance.
If the charge of state-level corruption damaged the saffron party’s perception, the US-based short-seller Hindenburg’s scathing report on the Adani Group – widely known as the favourite corporate house of the Modi government – and subsequent opposition backlash against the Union government on the matter also tarnished the prime minister’s rather pious image.
The Patna meeting of opposition parties is a similar retort to the alleged growing autocratic and over-centralising impulses of the Modi government. The parties have accused the BJP-led governments of trying to invalidate the opposition forces through arbitrary arrests, raids, and false charges of corruption. They have also made a united call against communal disharmony, cronyism, and the Modi government’s alleged anti-poor policies over the last nine years.
In dismissing the opposition alliance-in-making as a collection of the “corrupt” and “dynastic interests”, the prime minister’s words seem all the more facile.
This article was first published by TheWire and written by Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
