Shikha Mukerjee | Why is Opp. helping Modi, BJP to regain lost ground?
With the Opposition political parties, a ragtag bunch of contentious and opportunistic collaborators, preferring to head into the doldrums rather than fulfil its promise to serve as a responsible counter-force, the ruling BJP at the Centre helmed by Narendra Modi is getting away with being incompetent.
Even as it refuses to admit that the economy is decelerating, people are hurting as making ends meet is increasingly more difficult, industry is in distress and vocal about it, barring some favoured few, farmers are in protest and making apparent their distress by committing suicide (an estimated 2,366 farmers ended their lives in Maharashtra alone, between January and October 2024), and some 1.5 crore students may or may not have dropped out of school, the Modi 3.0 government cannot stop bragging about India’s economic transformation as a powerhouse in the past decade.
To call out the Modi government, India’s Opposition, including its biggest party, the Congress, has to work as an Opposition. It has to first, hold the Modi government to account, and second, stop itself from grasping greedily at rotting carrots that are dangled in front of it, like claims of hundreds of temples have to be restored where mosques now exist, as an action replay of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir-Babri Masjid demolition. By expanding the claim, as Yogi Adityanath of Uttar Pradesh has done, to all other alleged such disputed structures, the issue is obviously a snare to trap the Opposition in a futile fight the BJP can’t lose, allowing it to dodge being answerable for its obvious incapability in tackling the growing economic crisis.
As fresh instalments of data released by, among others, the government’s statistics and programme implementation ministry, confirm that the economy is tanking and most Indians have no money to buy goods and services, which means there is no demand, that has a knock-on effect on industrial production, there is confirmation from industry the situation is increasingly precarious. CII president Sanjiv Puri, who recently talked about the problem of flagging consumption and a dipping growth trajectory of the Indian economy, and Nestle India’s chairman, Suresh Narayanan, are equally bothered; their assessment is the “shrinking” of what “used to be a middle-class segment”. The warning is loud and clear. It is not only the 80 crore recipients of the free food scheme who are hurting, but industry is, too. If it was only the bleeding-heart Leftists and the Khan Market gang who sashay around the shops and eateries in the area saying this, Modi 3.0 may have had a point, but that isn’t the case.
If industry leaders are talking in the past tense about the shrinking middle class and noting there is sharp inequality skewing the market as “people with money are spending like that is going out of style”, nothing is right with India’s economy. If this were said by Thomas Piketty, economist and author of Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj, the Modi government could dismiss it as a biased opinion based on incorrect data. Worsening inequalities matter to industry, because the top one per cent is not a market that can sustain big global producers.
The only people insulated from the strain of making ends meet seems to the India’s irresponsible political class, barring the Left, which has been reduced by its own failures, to a feeble voice. It no longer matters, regardless of what it once was, the conscience keeper of the political class, talking at a pitch about farmers, working people and the poor in ways that compelled whichever party was in power at the Centre to listen. There is no massive mobilisation of protest to hold the Modi government to account for its wilful denial that there are problems, essentially of its own making on spiralling food prices, high fuel prices, high input costs for agriculture, education, healthcare, housing compounded by a decelerating economy.
There are two parts to India’s current Opposition: on the one hand is the narcissist Congress, consumed by its past, and on the other are the regional and smaller parties, including the handful of principally parliamentary Left parties comprising the CPI(M), the rump CPI and the emerging CPI(M-L) Liberation. At this point, it appears, the two parts cannot agree to work together against their common principal enemy, that is, the BJP.
Three leaders, Omar Abdullah of the National Conference, Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and, before them, Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamul Congress, have spoken out against the Congress leadership vis-a-vis the coalition formation, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, that was birthed before the Lok Sabha 2024 election. While Mamata Banerjee has told the Congress to step aside and offered to lead the INDIA bloc, Mr Abdullah has been explicit: “Unfortunately, no INDIA alliance meeting is being organised so there is no clarity about leadership, agenda, or our (INDIA bloc’s) existence... They should wind up the alliance in case it was just for the Parliament elections.”
The decelerating economy is a perfect opportunity for the Opposition to do its job of representing the other half of India’s voters, who did not choose the BJP in the Lok Sabha 2024 election. For that to happen, however, the Congress, which claims to be the national party of India based on its history, needs to stop chasing one particular allegedly crony capitalist; it needs to represent those from the industry who are worried about the future. It must, along with the parties who set up the INDIA bloc, expand its currently seriously limited bandwidth to speak, demonstrate, and if necessary, court arrest, by protesting on behalf of people who can no longer afford to buy what is necessary for a decent life. It is not just inflation that is a concern; declining capital formation is. The slowdown has affected job formation and real wages are down.
The regional and smaller parties have limitations in tackling these very large-size issues. That does not absolve them of the responsibility to do so. If the Congress is failing because of its obsession with going up the down staircase, there cannot be a vacuum in the Opposition space, nor can these parties malinger in the doldrums. To do so is to collectively gift the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi a second wind to reoccupy the space that it was pushed out from in the 2024 general election.