The who's who of Indian politics warming up for kaun banega prime minister 2024

With just 18 months left till the 2024 General Election, PM hopefuls are beginning to show their hand. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Most non-BJP chief ministers seem to be thinking that they have a shot at the prime ministership after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. This is clear from the statements made by a number of them in the last couple of weeks.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee showed her hand right after her party’s grand victory in last year’s assembly elections. She flew down quickly to Delhi and met leaders like Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar. But it is unlikely that she got much satisfaction from these meetings. She then tried but failed to make any headway in several state elections, like in the Northeast and Goa. Now, after keeping quiet about her national ambitions for some months, she is back.

On Thursday, she announced at a meeting in Kolkata: “Now we are all together. There's Nitish Kumar, Akhilesh Yadav, Hemant Soren. I am there. Our friends are there. All parties are together. (The BJP’s) arrogance of 280-300 seats will be their nemesis...remember Rajiv Gandhi had 400 (seats in the 1984 Lok Sabha elections) but that didn't stick.”

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has allied once more with Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), spent four days in Delhi, meeting non-BJP leaders and calling for “opposition unity”. And Telangana chief minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao has declared that his party Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) will enter national politics with the slogan “BJP-mukt Bharat”, and promised free power to farmers across the country if a non-BJP government is formed in 2024.

Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi is off on his 3,570-km 150-day Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite India March), whose launch ceremony was attended by Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin, who handed over a national flag to Gandhi. Stalin also had Arvind Kejriwal as chief guest at the inauguration function of a new government school project. And it is plain as day that Kejriwal has prime ministerial ambitions.

The trouble with opposition unity, of course, is that it has historically proved to be brittle. The primary reason for this is obviously personal egos. All these politicians believe that they should be leading the country, irrespective of the fact that most voters in, say, Assam, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh may not have even heard of K. Chandrasekhar Rao. Nitish Kumar hopes to forge a united front with himself as the leader, but even in his native Bihar, his party Janata Dal (U) is the third largest in the legislative assembly, after the RJD and the BJP. Why would Mamata Banerjee, who enjoys a three-fourth majority in the West Bengal Vidhan Sabha, accept Kumar as her leader?

Other than the Congress, all these parties are absolutely regional in their nature and voter base. Except for the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), none has managed to find a toehold in any state outside their own. And even the Congress’ role as the only national party apart from the BJP has been diminishing rapidly. It has more or less ceased to exist in large parts of the country.

The sharpest brain in the opposition lot is possibly Arvind Kejriwal. Even those who hate him passionately would have to admit his political acumen. He knows how to stay in the news, is an expert in the art of spin, and among all non-BJP leaders other than the Gandhis, could well have the highest name recall across the country. His party is in power in only two states—and Delhi is not even a full state—yet he has achieved national recognition.

Negative media reports about him are rare, and an important reason for this is that he has a humungous advertising budget—the Delhi government spent nearly Rs 500 crore on advertising in 2021-22. To put this figure in perspective, the Modi government’s average annual advertising spend has been about Rs 300 crore since coming to power for the second time in 2019.

Kejriwal can keep shifting his stances on various issues, be forced to apologize for his public utterings, make wild claims, play the victim card at the drop of a hat, make a mountain out of some molehill-sized achievement, but has been able to maintain a more-or-less untarnished image in the eyes of the Indian voter.

He also has age on his side. He is 54, which means he has at least two decades of active politics ahead of him. His current strategy seems to be to occupy the slightly left-of-centre political and voter-mindshare space that traditionally used to be with the Congress, but which the party has been steadily losing. He may succeed in his goal in the next few years.

Perhaps the strongest glue that can hold a united opposition together is its shared hatred for Narendra Modi. But will that be enough to win the Lok Sabha? After all, Modi is a master of the grand narrative and he will certainly turn the 2024 elections into a choice between him and the rest. For the last eight years, every opinion poll has concluded that Modi is the voters’ preferred prime minister by a wide margin.

India is now 18 months away from parliamentary elections. The old cliché goes that 18 months is a very long time in politics, but how likely is it that a bunch of politicians whose personal ambitions conflict with one another will be able to form an effective cohesive front? As things stand, not very.