Compulsions spur tie-ups among INDIA members

AT long last, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) is taking baby steps towards putting up a facade of consolidation, even as its insides bristle with insecurities and tensions that are casting doubts over the coalition’s capability to challenge the BJP-led NDA in the Lok Sabha polls.

The most significant aspect of the tie-ups firmed up last week by the Congress with the Samajwadi Party (SP) in Uttar Pradesh and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, Haryana and Gujarat is a belated realisation in the grand old party that it no longer holds the command of a coalition from an imperious perch. In the joust for leverage — in this case, limited to seat-sharing and not leadership or yet crafting a political narrative — between a pan-India party such as the Congress and regional entities, the playing field is uneven. There are potential Congress allies such as the Trinamool Congress (TMC) that are steadfastly unwilling to accept the upper hand it would like and there are those like the SP and AAP, which refused to compromise while extracting their part of the bargain from the party. The just-settled relationships look so transactional that both sides must wonder if there is headroom for them to fashion an ideological countervail against the BJP, which reminds voters at every step of its ‘commitment’ to the RSS’s credo despite the blatant cynicism it demonstrates in a bid to retain power.

Of course, AAP leader and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal raised a smidgen of hope among voters with the promise that INDIA would be their ‘safety net’, protecting his flagship schemes from the Centre’s alleged predation.

Regional parties have their own compulsions while safeguarding their terrain. Most of them, especially the SP, were buffeted by serial setbacks amid the BJP’s national ascendancy.

If the SP does not put up a respectable show on the 63 seats it will contest (17 have been apportioned to the Congress) — which means that it needs to win more than just the legacy seats claimed by its chief Akhilesh Yadav’s family — it will be left battered and demoralised before the 2027 UP polls. Since 2014, the SP has lost every election in UP, including the 2017 Assembly polls fought together with the Congress. It was then a half-hearted pact that was mutually broken on quite a few seats. Akhilesh, then the chief minister, and Rahul Gandhi led the campaign on the ‘UP ke do ladke’ (UP’s two boys) slogan, but on the ground, the SP found it hard to transfer its base vote from the Yadav caste to the Congress. This time, notwithstanding the early hiccups, the seat-sharing was clinched more amicably, simply because both sides are desperate to survive. According to insiders, the big expectation is that the Muslim vote will go to the alliance despite the proven tendency of the third player, the Bahujan Samaj Party, to field many candidates belonging to the minorities in order to split votes. Had the SP not tied up with the Congress, the minority vote would have been fragmented.

With AAP, the considerations for sewing up a partnership were many. Delhi had handed a runaway victory to the BJP in the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, reinforcing AAP’s status as a small entity in contrast to Kejriwal’s lofty ambitions. AAP was rendered more vulnerable after the Centre enacted a statute truncating the Delhi Government’s powers and importantly, whittling down the CM’s authority over his own bureaucrats. Then, the probe into the excise case zeroed in on two of Kejriwal’s prime aides and ministers, leading to their incarceration.

However, Kejriwal never let on that he was negotiating with the Congress from a weakened position. In fact, he delivered the first blow to an incipient INDIA in its first meeting in June last year when he threatened to walk out if the Congress would not publicly declare its opposition to the Delhi Services Bill. Later, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge resolved the impasse by setting up a parliamentary strategy group for issues arising out of alliances. AAP got the seats it wanted in Delhi — four out of seven — leaving three for the Congress in the hope that the arrangement will consolidate the traditional vote of both parties from the minorities, Dalits and a section of the migrants. AAP ensured that there was no alliance in Punjab for a tactical reason: had the two tied up, the anti-AAP vote might have shifted largely to the Shiromani Akali Dal or the BJP.

West Bengal clearly illustrated the Congress’ susceptibility against a powerful provincial leader, the TMC’s Mamata Banerjee, who has had an unbroken run since 2011, barring a reversal in the 2019 Lok Sabha poll when the BJP won an unprecedentedly large number of seats. Still, Mamata managed to stay afloat and recouped in the Assembly elections that followed. The Congress-TMC discord was exacerbated by the continuing fulminations against Mamata by state Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury. Defenceless against Mamata, the Congress has not even tried to rein in Chowdhury.

There is no question of identifying a leader for INDIA. Its limited objective seems to be to hold back the BJP wherever it can. The Congress is fortunate that its alliance in Bihar — despite the JD(U)’s exit — and Tamil Nadu stand intact, but will the party’s top brass check the daily exodus to the BJP from its rank and file and convey an impression that it is at least half-way robust? The BJP’s intention is to hollow out the Congress. Combating the few regional players standing up to it so far can come later.