Opposition Unity: Far from a regrouping, Siddaramaiah’s swearing-in saw battle lines within non-BJP spectrum harden

Several leaders of different political parties attended the swearing-in ceremony of Congress leader Siddaramaiah in Karnataka's Bengaluru on May 20, 2023. (AP Photo)

The anticipated regrouping of a section of the Opposition at Bengaluru’s Kanteerava Stadium on May 20 to witness the swearing-in of Siddaramaiah as the Karnataka chief minister cannot even be described as a work in progress.

Contrary to paving the way for a larger unity among the non-BJP spectrum before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the event demonstrated that the lines of disunity in the Opposition have hardened, in part attributable to the Congress’s newfound confidence (overconfidence?) in its presumed ability to challenge the BJP almost solo and in part to the unwillingness of certain parties to endorse the Congress’s preeminence.

A Tale Of Two Swearing-Ins: 2018 and 2023

This feature was apparent in the Congress’s exclusion of the Aam Aadmi Party, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi, Biju Janata Dal, YSR Congress Party, and the Bahujan Samaj Party from the function. While the BSP is unarguably down and out presently, the other four entities are vital links in a chain that could potentially bind the Opposition into a whole. The Trinamool Congress Party, Samajwadi Party and Rashtriya Lok Dal were among the invitees who dialled down their participation or stayed away: TMC chief Mamata Banerjee neither attended nor sent a weighty representative; the SP and RLD kept away.

This showed the complexities in bringing together the Opposition in a pre-poll scenario because the TMC, SP and RLD viewed the Congress as a rival on their turfs and realised the futility of doing any manner of business right now for fear of sending the “wrong” signals to their party cadres as well as their voters.

Rewind to May 24, 2018, and recall the stage outside Bengaluru’s Vidhana Soudha where HD Kumaraswamy, the Janata Dal (Secular) leader, was sworn in as the CM in a Congress-JD(S) coalition that was short-lived. Sonia Gandhi’s presence infused a frisson to the occasion which commentators described as the coming together of the new MMS, denoting Mayawati, Mamata and Sonia.

Sonia herself was missing this time as were the two Ms. Five years ago, it looked like this sorority ushered the beginning of hope for the Opposition to combat the Modi-led BJP. A year later, everything unravelled before the Lok Sabha polls, proving the transience of the most attractive optics and the almost unbridgeable gap existing between hope and ground realities.

Futile Chasing Opposition Unity

Doubtless the Congress’s Karnataka victory on a scale unanticipated by most pollsters gave a fillip to the party’s ambitions and ought to have shored up its position to reassemble the Opposition and stake a claim to lead in 2024. Instead the Congress itself drew the red lines by showing who was wanted and who was not. Indeed, Pinarayi Vijayan’s exclusion from the guest list on the ground that only Congress CMs and those leading alliance governments (MK Stalin, Nitish Kumar and Tejashwi Yadav) were invited provoked jibes from CPI(M) politburo member Prakash Karat even as the party’s general secretary Sitaram Yechury played peacemaker in Bengaluru.

For Mamata, one straw in the wind was unsettling. In March this year, the Congress won the Sagardighi bypoll in West Bengal. Its candidate was backed by the Left Front. In a constituency with 63 percent Muslims, the TMC’s vote share plunged from 50.95 percent in the 2021 assembly polls to 34.94 percent, indicating a shift in the minority votes towards the Congress-Left. Not only will Mamata have to fight a perennially belligerent BJP, she will have to contain a movement of the Muslim votes away from the TMC. Similarly the SP and RLD have to contend with the fact that Muslim voters in the recent Uttar Pradesh polls gravitated towards the Congress to signal to Akhilesh Yadav that he cannot take their support for granted.

The AAP, which is battling the Centre’s headwinds, sought the Opposition’s support to fight the Centre’s ordinance to create an authority which will decide on the postings and transfers of top bureaucrats in the Delhi government. While the Congress’s Delhi leaders continued to be antagonistic towards Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, National Conference leader Omar Abdullah reminded Kejriwal of his support to the Centre on the reading down of Article 370 in J&K.

However, Janata Dal (United) leader and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar called on Kejriwal on Sunday to express solidarity with his stand against the central ordinance, reflecting the possibility that the Congress could eventually be isolated in the Opposition.

Recent history shows that chasing Opposition unity before an election is futile because each constituent, big and small, aspires to bolster its numbers and form bargaining chips in an eventuality. The United Front and the United Progressive Alliance came into being after the elections. While these entities might be one on keeping the BJP away in 2024, emphasising the centrality of an anti-BJP plank will help the BJP polarise the polity even more sharply.

Radhika Ramaseshan is a senior journalist and columnist. She was the political editor at The Telegraph. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.