June 19 bypolls expose I.N.D.I.A bloc's political fractures

Cong, AAP & Trinamool united in Parliament, divided on the ground

New Delhi: The June 19 bypolls to five seats in four states have once again exposed the fault-lines in the I.N.D.I.A bloc with major parties finding no common ground and fighting against each other.

Congress is fighting all five seats in Gujarat (Visavadar and Kadi), West Bengal (Kaliganj), Punjab (Ludhiana-West) and Kerala (Nilambur) while AAP is fighting in Gujarat and Punjab. Trinamool Congress is fighting its sitting seat Kaliganj while the CPI(M) is fighting Nilambur.

In West Bengal, Congress, which is usually fighting with the Left in the past one decade, has fielded a candidate against Trinamool Congress, an I.N.D.I.A constituent, even as there were earlier some attempts at striking an electoral understanding between both the parties.

Both the Congress and the Left Front had contested against each other in the bypolls to six seats last November which the Trinamool won easily. Trinamool has been insisting that it was the only party in the I.N.D.I.A bloc that had not entered into any electoral understanding or alliance and it would remain so.

However, this round of bypolls saw the Trinamool Congress trying to enter the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) in Kerala through a former Left-back independent MLA PV Anvar, who joined the party. Anvar announced support for the UDF initially but as the Congress announced his bete noir Aryadan Shoukat as candidate, he attacked the alliance and Trinamool has now announced him as the candidate.

The central leadership of Congress also did not give its green signal for Trinamool’s entry into the Kerala alliance due to its reservations over the Mamata Banerjee-led party’s uneasy relationship with it.

While Congress and AAP are reconciled to fighting against each other like the Congress and the Left in Kerala owing to political realities of the state, the already fragile relationship between both the Congress and the Arvind Arvind Kejriwal-led party in Gujarat has been unravelled after fighting the Lok Sabha elections together. In the November bypolls, AAP had not fielded a candidate against Congress.

In Visavadar where AAP had a sitting MLA, who switched sides to BJP necessitating the bypoll, Kejriwal led a roadshow for AAP candidate Gopal Italia on Saturday and recalled a 2022 formula in which AAP did not field candidates in bypolls where Congress was holding the seat.

“We did not contest those five seats (in 2022) but in Visavadar, we reminded Congress about it but it did not agree. Congress is a betrayer,” Kejriwal said.

Opposition sources said one should not read much into the latest developments and it had happened during the last year bypolls and these things would continue. “One should look at how these parties cooperate with each other in Parliament. They are united there,” a senior Opposition leader said.