Shikha Mukerjee | INDIA gets set, preparing for liftoff; BJP gets jitters

After the successful meeting of the INDIA parties in Mumbai, which had ended with a slogan: “Judega Bharat, Jeetega INDIA”; the 29-party INDIA collective is ready to lift off. In the just under seven weeks when it met in Bengaluru to present itself to the nation as the INDIA collective, signs of transformation in the political space are now beginning to show.

INDIA is poised to unveil itself as a credible challenger to the hitherto invincibility of the BJP and its most popular leader Narendra Modi. The date has been set, October 2, and the place, New Delhi, where the alliance expects to see itself in power in 2024.

The BJP’s gaslighting -- the bewildering announcement of a special joint session of Parliament, possibly in the new building, that by the end of the day failed to answer the pertinent question -- what is the agenda of the session -- bombed. The “One Nation, One Election” kite that it flew to rattle the INDIA Opposition and monopolise the chatter in the media and the social media turned out to be a flop. There was a third attempt to steal the show, the announcement of the Amrit Kalash Yatra, an inclusive green-earth project that sank.

The party and its leadership overplayed the move to seize attention and keep it focused on itself.

The committee headed by former President Ram Nath Kovind has many of the usual suspects and the refusal by Congress Lok Sabha leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury will be a positive embarrassment for the proposers, because its ambitions are as unrealistic as they are bizarre.

The facts point to the unfortunate conclusion that by the time the INDIA parties announced their plans for the next one month, the BJP failed to ignite the gas. It did not inform the nation what was the whole point of the enormously expensive special session. It failed to consult with the Opposition, which would have been proper, by calling a meeting of the business advisory committees of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. There was noise over the very dangerous move to impose an entirely undemocratic calendar on elections; but that’s all it was.

INDIA has raised the political stakes for the BJP and is jostling with the party’s most popular Prime Minister for public and media attention. Having raised expectations, especially among that entirely fickle layer of educated, influential relatively better-off middle-class voters, a large percentage of which tends to be swayed by rhetoric, suboptimal economic policies and miraculous cures for failing governance, the INDIA parties now need to begin to act as responsibly and convincingly as they have begun.

This is not to argue that INDIA as an alliance is set to defeat the BJP and oust Narendra Modi from power should a snap Lok Sabha election be called by the Prime Minister tomorrow. For that matter, the BJP itself is not ready for such an adventure; it has just begun setting its squabbling house in order in several fractious states and it needs to serve up a few more “revdis”, or freebies, once described as irresponsible financial profligacy by the Supreme Court on the one hand and the finance minister and external affairs minister on the other.

There is much that the INDIA parties have to do between now and whenever the Lok Sabha election is called. That sense of urgency was finally understood at the Mumbai conclave, prodded by the BJP’s gaslighting and the misgivings of senior partners like Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United) and Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamul Congress.

The events of August 31-September 1 capture with exquisite accuracy Prof. Partha Chatterjee’s point “time is heterogeneous, unevenly dense”, in his book The Politics of the Governed. The 48 hours were very dense indeed, with INDIA blossoming into being on the one hand and the BJP launching a pre-emptive slapdash missile-drone mission on the other.

The centrality of unifying India and rescuing it from the grip of the viciously divisive Hindutva agenda of the militant right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its political instrument, the BJP, is evident in INDIA’s slogan of “Judega Bharat-Jeetega INDIA”. Converting this slogan into a political narrative will require back-breaking labour.

AAP supremo Arvind Kejriwal hit the nail on the head; it is imperative for all Opposition parties to unify to win. In doing so, he conceded that his efforts to stitch together an anti-Congress-anti-BJP alliance in the past was a bad idea. INDIA, if it plans to succeed, does not have the luxury of indulging in the on-off efforts that it has made in the past nine, almost 10 years. By all accounts, the constituents of INDIA have been both brisk and business-like in Mumbai, getting through an agenda of committee formation, date setting and finalising a slogan in record time.

INDIA now has to work on its strategy to define its targets on what must change or be corrected and how it will do so in plain-speak so that the man or woman on the street can relate to it in terms of lived experiences. Abstractions will not sway voters unless they realise how it is impacting them in the present. How will INDIA translate its promise to defend the basic structure of the Constitution and undo what it believes is destructive tampering? Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s unerring identification of the problem -- “However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad... However bad a Constitution may be, if those implementing it are good, it will prove to be good” -- is INDIA’s real headache. The alliance has to propose policy measures that deliver secularism, justice, equality and inclusion, including prevent “concentration of wealth” or “mitra parivarvaad”, as Rahul Gandhi described it.

The downside of the new formation is that the constituents of INDIA are parties of unequal size. The Congress is big, the Revolutionary Socialist Party is tiny. Even if the coordination committee succeeds working out a list of “as many as possible” one-to-one contests between the BJP and the INDIA parties, there is more that it needs to do. Anti-BJP votes will need to be pooled instead of squandered, or transferred to the BJP by disgruntled loyalists of one or another party.

By not identifying a potential face to challenge Narendra Modi, INDIA parties have been smart. Up to now, INDIA as an alliance has been unexpectedly adroit; its challenge is to remain as nimble and quick as it has proved itself to be between meetings in Patna, Bengaluru and now Mumbai to keep the BJP on edge.