An election without opposition unity will be a no-contest
The INDIA grouping took a fresh blow over the weekend as West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) left the Congress party in the cold on pre-poll seat sharing, announcing its own candidates for all 42 seats up for contest in the state in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. This amounts to fresh evidence of deep internal differences within the group that have all along clouded its prospects of putting up a credible joint front against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which rules the country at the Centre. Earlier, the opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had said it would go solo in Punjab, although it did strike a seat-sharing pact with the Congress in Delhi.
Its differing positions are perhaps explained by its strength in the two states. Having won eight of Punjab’s 13 parliamentary seats in 2019, AAP sees itself as the dominant player there, and hence does not want to cede space. In Delhi, however, despite AAP’s overwhelming majority in the state assembly, its seven Lok Sabha seats were swept entirely by the BJP five years ago.
So, a coordinated fight by AAP and Congress makes more sense in the national capital. That said, such divisions within the INDIA bloc make for bad optics. Politics, after all, is about perceptions.
And with the opposition group’s members pulling in different directions, the BJP has taken a clear lead as far as pre-poll arrangements go—even though it expects to win power once again on its own. Over the weekend, the BJP brought the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of Andhra Pradesh back into the fold of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which it leads. How the two parties split the 25 seats in this southern state is yet to be worked out, but these details look like just a formality.
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