ON A WING AND A PRAYER

Since June 2023, when the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) was formed, the 28-party Opposition grouping has gone through several periods of political turbulence.

The objective of the formation was to put up a united fight to avoid a split in the votes against the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

On the ground, though, I.N.D.I.A.’s arithmetic has not added up so far. Founder-member and Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar has decamped to the BJP side, Mamata Banerjee’s s Trinamool Congress has decided to go solo in West Bengal and the Northeast; in Kerala, the Left parties are putting up candidates against ally Congress. More than all this, the I.N.D.I.A. bloc has failed to come up with a coherent narrative against the BJP other than criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi which, as the National Conference’s Omar Abdullah admitted, hasn’t stuck on the teflon-coated PM. They have talked about the threat to India’s democratic norms and institutions and marginalisation of the minorities, but a common alliance agenda is nowhere in sight. Sachin Pilot of the Congress, though, is still optimistic: “Don’t forget, in 2019, the BJP won less than 37 per cent of the vote. That means two-thirds of the voters who went to the polling booth voted against the BJP.”