Jigsaw Fizzle

Unity of opposition parties seems to be a work in progress.

- Soni Mishra

The venue was neutral, and the table round, indicating that it was a conclave of peers. Yet Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s call for a meeting of opposition parties and a joint press conference at the Constitution Club in Delhi on December 27 met with limited success. Only eight of the 15 parties that were invited attended.

Rahul had rubbed the opposition chieftains the wrong way on the last day of the winter session of Parliament. Their hopes of a concerted attack against the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi had soared when he announced that he had information of personal corruption by Modi. As they were expecting Rahul to make the exposé, he let them down by meeting Modi to take up the issues of farmers of Uttar Pradesh. It came just ahead of an opposition march to Rashtrapati Bhavan to petition President Pranab Mukherjee on the demonetisation. Many parties dropped out of the march.

Perhaps mindful of the damage he had done to the cause of opposition unity, Rahul tried to strike a conciliatory note after the meeting at the Constitution Club, by praising the other parties. “We are very happy to embrace them,” he said.

As he now raises the pitch of his attack against Modi, terming the demonetisation as an anti-people decision that has hurt the poor the most and benefitted the rich, he needs the support of other opposition forces to amplify the attack. Therein lies the realisation that a weakened Congress cannot take on Modi single-handedly.