Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 5: With the Congress losing its bargaining capacity following its rout in the Hindi heartland in the just concluded elections to five state assemblies, several regional parties have started staking their claims for leadership choice within the INDIA bloc of the opposition parties for the 2024 Parliamentary elections.
Most of the opposition parties have refused to recognise the Congress rout as a setback to the INDIA alliance pointing out that the Congress had fought the elections on its own without taking other alliance partners into confidence and it was purely rejection of the Grand Old Party by the people and not the other non-BJP parties.
Even though the opposition leaders disagreed that there was crack in the INDIA alliance after the Congress party’s unilateral behaviour, the alliance has decided to reschedule the meeting of party heads sometime in the third week of December amid reports of difference cropping up between various parties. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had earlier scheduled the meeting for Wednesday but was deferred as several parties expressed their inability to attend it due to their pre-scheduled engagements. Instead of the full meeting, only the 14-member coordination panel will meet at Mr Kharge’s residence on Wednesday.
The scheduled meeting of the alliance parties was met with lukewarm response by several of the front leaders. West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee claimed that she would go ahead with her State programs as she was not aware of the meeting call. “I don’t know, I have no information so I kept a programme in North Bengal… If we had the information, we wouldn’t have scheduled those programmes. We would have definitely gone (for the meeting), but we have not received any information,” the TMC chief said on Monday.
According to Congress sources, several key Opposition leaders will not be able to attend the meeting that was earlier scheduled on Wednesday. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin will not be able to come to Delhi as several areas of the State have been badly hit by Cyclone Michaung. Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar will not be able to make it to the national capital owing to his illness. Similarly, West Bengal Mamata Banerjee would have given it a miss owing to a wedding in her family.
Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren had informed Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge of his inability to make it for a meeting on Wednesday. “I will be busy here. I spoke to Kharge Ji yesterday, maybe a representative from our side will go,” Mr Soren told reporters in Ranchi.
“A coordination meeting of Parliamentary Party leaders of India Alliance will be at 6 pm on December 6th, 2023 at the residence of Congress President Sh. Mallikarjun Kharge. Thereafter meeting of Party Presidents/ Heads of the India Alliance will be scheduled in third week of December at a date convenient to all,” Gurdeep Singh Sappal, the Coordinator of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, said in a post on ‘X’.
Seat sharing for the Lok Sabha polls, which are just four months away, is likely to be at the top of the agenda of the meeting. The next INDIA bloc meeting would also be crucial for Congress, particularly as the party lost Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls, the Hindi heartland States that send a large number of members to the Parliament.
However, the Congress could find the going tough in this meeting, with key ally Samajwadi Party having struck a belligerent tone against the Congress in the Assembly elections. SP chief Akhilesh Yadav had accused the Congress of betraying the SP by not giving it tickets to contest in a potential alliance with the Congress in MP.
The Congress now desperately needs the alliance to take off, if it harbours any hope of giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP competition in the 2024 election.
INDIA or ‘Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance’ is a group of 28 Opposition parties, including the Congress. The parties have come together to take on the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the BJP and prevent it from winning a third straight term at the Centre in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
Having pressed the pause button on the INDIA bloc, putting the Opposition alliance in a state of suspended animation while it focussed on Assembly elections, the Congress is now facing the fury of the coalition’s other constituents, who are calling it a missed opportunity.
The three-month period in limbo was marked by rancour between the Congress and its allies, which peaked with the Congress’ Madhya Pradesh president Kamal Nath’s jibe in response to Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav’s accusation of betrayal. Barring Telangana, where the Congress gave one seat to the Communist Party of India, the party refused to accommodate any of its INDIA allies in the other three States. Mr Yadav has not yet commented on the Assembly poll results, but Mr Nath’s remarks have returned to haunt his party, with allies circulating it to highlight the Congress’ antipathy. National Conference leader Omar Abdullah also taunted the Congress for belatedly remembering INDIA, and went on to proclaim that if the situation does not change, the coalition cannot hope to win the 2024 election.
A TMC leader pointed out that they had wanted seat-sharing arrangements to be put in place by October 31, in order to put up a credible fight in next year’s Lok Sabha election. “Had the car been running in third gear, this bump [that is, the Congress rout in three States] would have only slowed it down. But they never started the car, which is now in reverse gear,” the leader said.
Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) is equally livid. “INDIA bloc did not fight this election, only the Congress did and therefore it is their defeat alone,” the party’s secretary general K.C. Tyagi said pointing out that no other party’s leader had been invited for campaigning. An over-confident Congress, he said, had cancelled INDIA’s first planned rally in Bhopal without consulting any allies; the event had been planned to send a solidarity message from the front in support of the Congress for the Madhya Pradesh polls, where it eventually fared the worst. Bhopal had been announced as the venue for the joint rally on September 13, following the first and last meeting of the INDIA coordination panel.
“The trend clearly indicates the need for secular democratic forces to redouble their effort in order to safeguard people’s livelihood interest and secular democratic character of the Indian republic,” Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury said. The CPI(M) had asked for only two seats in Telangana, which the Congress State leadership refused to concede at the last minute, forcing the CPI(M) to go it alone in the polls.
AFTER THE Congress’s poor show in the recent Assembly polls, the JD(U) has renewed its demand to project party supremo and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as probable prime minister face of the INDIA bloc, adding that the party’s brand of politics would dominate the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
The JD(U) chief national spokesperson KC Tyagi said, “Though it is the call of INDIA bloc constituents to decide whether the alliance should go with a PM face or not, we will reiterate that Nitish Kumar has all the qualities a PM should have. Nitish Kumar’s brand of development and socialist politics will dominate the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.” Tyagi also highlighted the caste angle, saying Nitish was the only leader in the INDIA bloc who had shown the courage to hold a caste survey and, on the basis of it, to increase the quota cap from 50% to 65%. “While some states conducted similar surveys before, none dared release the report because of political reasons… The INDIA bloc should revisit its politics, with Nitish Kumar playing a key role in it,” said Tyagi.
On Monday, the Trinamool Congress had put forward its supremo Mamata Banerjee’s claim to lead the INDIA bloc, saying a person who had beaten the BJP “multiple times” and had long administrative experience should be picked.
