Where is Agenda to Save the Constitution? India is Tottering

Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) would be enjoying a mischievous smile over the way the alliance partners of INDIA are bickering among themselves just six months after it was able to prevent Narendra Modi to get even a simple majority, let alone crossing his own target of crossing 400.

But thereafter, the elder brother of the alliance, Congress, lost the Haryana Assembly election, performed poorly in Jammu and Kashmir and faced rout along with MVA partners in the Maharashtra election.

The Maharashtra election was the last straw for the INDIA alliance partners to target the Congress, particularly Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, for what they felt was that Gandhi was showing no signs of leading them to power at the Centre.

They started going their own ways, inside and outside Parliament. The corruption charges against billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani came handy for them to question Rahul’s credentials.

When Rahul Gandhi adopted the tactics of disrupting the Lok Sabha proceedings, prominent India Alliance partners– Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and the Aam Aadmi Party– distanced themselves from it, arguing that there were more important issues for them to raise. 

They felt left out on the political strategy of the alliance. In the meanwhile, Mamata Banerjee staked her claim for the INDIA leadership, and Lalu Prasad and Sharad Pawar came out in her support.  CPI Secretary D Raja alleged that the Congress ignored the allies in Haryana, and even in Maharashtra. It needs to introspect. Ramgopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party said that a capable leader can say this.

But the Congress dismissed her claim for the leadership as a posturing to raise her stocks in the leadership fight with her nephew Abhishek Banerjee.

However, the differences among them became sharper during the run up to the Delhi Assembly election when the Congress used expletives against the AAP. Congress Treasurer Ajay Maken called Arvind Kejriwal ‘Farjiwal’ (conman) and anti- national. AAP retaliated impulsively and said that it would talk with other like-minded partners to oust the Congress from the India Alliance itself. Though Kejriwal did not act on that. Later, another AAP prominent leader said that the alliance partners would sit together and talk through after the Delhi Assembly election. The two had fought the Lok Sabha election together in Delhi and other places. Now they are facing each other's throats.

Congress has put up candidates in all the constituencies. Sandeep Dixit, son of former Delhi Chief Minister Late Sheila Dixit, has challenged Arvind Kejriwal in the New Delhi constituency from where his mother was elected to the Assembly thrice.

Rahul Gandhi is leading the campaign and targeting Arvind Kejriwal on woeful civic amenities in the Capital. Besides, the party has landed about 30 other leaders to campaign. Congress taking the election quite seriously has forced the AAP on the backfoot. It has had to announce a series of benefit schemes to hold onto power.

Kejriwal has got a clear message: that the fight is not that easy this time round. Corruption charges against him, Manish Sisodiya and Satyendra Jain are also an issue which will have an impact on the poll.

The finger-pointing at each other by the Congress and the AAP has the BJP see chances to disrupt the AAP’s apple cart. Modi landed full steam in the campaign and coined a new word by suffixing AAP with Da’ AAP-da’. BJP is also enthused by its successes in neighbouring Haryana and Maharashtra.

Congress is in the fray not only to make its presence noticeable in Delhi but also to disrupt the two-decades uninterrupted run of AAP, and post-election act as a kingmaker, if not a king.

Rahul has also made it clear that the alliance was only for the Lok Sabha election. Now the alliance has reached a stage where it is fighting an existential crisis. They have forgotten the sine qua non on which they had agreed to forge an alliance: to fight the onslaught of the Hindutva on secularism and the Constitution.

Rahul Gandhi campaigned with a pocket-size copy of the Constitution to drive home the poll agenda to the voters in the Lok Sabha election. But the Congress would not let the leadership of the alliance slip out of its hands. Similarly, the major alliance partners– TMC and SP– would not allow themselves to be eclipsed under the overwhelming shadow of the Congress.

Rahul Gandhi seems to have adopted a wait and watch policy because he does want the alliance to unravel as it knows it cannot fight BJP alone. Recently, Gandhi met Lalu Prasad and his son Tejaswi Yadav at Patna when he went there to participate in the ‘Save Constitution’ programme. It seems the reverses in the Assembly elections have seen the glue– success in the Lok Sabha election– for the INDIA partners to stick together unstuck. Otherwise, they would not start quarrelling so early.

BJP is letting no chances go waste to weaken the opposition alliance. It keeps rubbing the point that the Congress wants to piggyback to power on the shoulders of regional political parties. It also keeps on whetting the prime ministerial aspirations of the alliance partners ridiculing that there are many claimants to the post.

Mamata Banerjee let her budding desire out when she said that she was ready to lead the alliance. Other regional leaders like Lalu Prasad, Sharad Yadav and others came out in her support because they feel they would be more comfortable with a prime minister of a regional party to wrest spoils to their liking than with a congressman occupying the South Block.

But Delhi politics watchers say that the INDIA alliance will not fall apart so quickly and so easily. The alliance partners know that their common enemy at the Centre is the one and only:  BJP. Plus, their minority constituency will be breathing down on their neck to stick together.

Maybe the regional parties’ outcry against the Rahul leadership is to snatch their pound of flesh. Congress showed there, during the Lok Sabha election when it conceded many seats to their partners, risking the displeasures of its local leadership. It paid it. After the consecutive drubbings, it touched the 100 makes.

Analysts feel that the infighting in the alliance will get resolved once frustration and depression post-Assembly defeats disappear over a period of time.  They have many miles to go if their commitment is to fight and defeat the BJP’s Hindutva agenda.