The new politics of polarisation: Hustling for space against the BJP

For the present, Nitish Kumar's exit from NDA and subsequent moves by the opposition have unsettled BJP

If it is coincidence, the opposition has had a lucky break. If it is calculation, then the opposition has figured out how to effectively hustle Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party out of hogging the limelight. The relentless domination of Modi and his party of prime time television and the social media space had transformed the opposition and its doings into fixed targets of attack, rather than political parties with independent identities, ideologies, histories and territories.

It is intriguing that the pushback became visible in the first week of September. The Modi regime was triumphantly broadcasting the returning health of the economy by releasing iffy data on employment and growth as well as the rise of India to number five in the IMF rankings of the world's largest economies, which hid from view the obvious, that is, the abysmally low per capita income for an economy that is large because of the population, increasing numbers of whom are desperately poor. The regime was busy touting the renaming of Raj Path as Kartavya Path and delivering a message of duty to the people.

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Challenging these signals of successful governance, the opposition, which is a whole made up of many small parts, upstaged Modi by seizing the moment and attacking the regime and the BJP's politics of majoritarianism and unvarnished communal intolerance. Leading the charge was Nitish Kumar, whose break up with the BJP in Bihar has succeeded in adding both heft and momentum to the pushback and reoccupation of the middle ground in Indian politics by the "secular, democratic forces", that is, the anti-BJP small and regional parties unified in their opposition. For starters, Nitish Kumar landed in New Delhi in the first week of September, like a battle-scarred veteran of his years as an ally of the BJP.

His re-entry into national politics was a sign and a symbol of growing opposition power, and he exploited it to the hilt by leveraging his past with the BJP to compete successfully against it. Prime time television and newspaper front pages were converted into assorted stadia where news on Nitish Kumar and his multiple meetings rivalled news on Modi and the BJP. In the capital, he proceeded to meet Rahul Gandhi of the Congress, Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Dipankar Bhattacharya of the CPI-ML, D Raja of the CPI, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Admi Party, Om Prakash Chautala of the Indian National Lok Dal, Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party, and paid courtesy calls on the new President Droupadi Murmu and Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar.

It was Nitish Kumar's "ghar wapsi", or homecoming, as Yechury described it, and the Bihar leader revelled in it. At the end of the visit, he declared that the new forces that were working together to oppose the BJP were the "Main Front", and not the Third Front. The distinction in terminology is important because it sets the increasingly unifying non-BJP opposition as the principal challenger to the BJP, instead of unstable partnerships led by different anti-BJP parties.

In that first week, the Congress launched its 'halla bol against mehangai (inflation), drawing attention to the crisis and its impact on the poor and middle-class families, unemployment and rising inequality, misery and hunger issues. It was also the week that the Congress launched its Bharat Jodo march from Kanyakumari, drawing attention to the BJP's politics of destructive and divisive communal politics, its desecration of the meaning and value of the Tricolour, and the need to build a larger unity to protect and defend the Indian Constitution and its foundational values. It was also the week when the Left mobilised agricultural workers, peasant organisations, women's organisations and student organisations who arrived in their thousands to participate in a national convention in New Delhi's Talkatora Stadium. The purpose of the meeting was a call for mass mobilisation under the Mazdoor-Kisan Sangharsh Rally banner that would take place before the 2023 budget.

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The "new polarisation" of "corrupt people" that Modi trashed during his Kerala tour, of "certain political groups" that are "openly coming out and trying to get organised into a unit" succeeded in manoeuvring the meeting of the BJP's masterminds led by Amit Shah into a nervous consultation on how to handle the challenge of the opposition in 2024. The message the BJP sent out was it needed to strengthen its organisation and make it better to win the 144 Lok Sabha seats the party lost in 2019. For a party that is deemed the largest in the world, which functions in election mode all year round, and is considered formidable in its discipline and organisation, a meeting on how to take on the opposition was a total giveaway.

Till now, Modi and the BJP have been dismissive of the opposition, calling the Congress and regional parties vehicles to perpetuate dynastic loot, that is, parivaarvad. By attacking the regional parties as fragmented opposition, Modi and his party have played up the monolithic strength of the BJP and created a narrative of its destiny as the unifying ruling regime, that is, One Nation-One Party.

In striking contrast, the collective of regional and small parties is now being re-branded as reflecting the core value embedded in India's Constitution, of heterogeneity. Speaking about the return of Nitish Kumar to the opposition side, Yechury underscored that seeing the heterogeneity as fragmented is "missing the wood for the trees." Elaborating on this, he pointed out that each of the parties in opposition to the BJP had separate "planks", which did not translate into a disunited opposition at loggerheads. There are issues that unify the opposition and these are fundamental to safeguarding the Constitution, democratic rights and civil liberties, he added.

The fight was between "personality" as in Modi as the leader who has no alternative and issues that unify the regional and small parties, running state governments where the agenda of development and meeting people's needs is under implementation through a wide range of programmes and schemes tailored to address the gaps, that the BJP insists as "freebies" to buy voter loyalty. By defining the nature of the fight, Yechury has challenged the BJP's discourse of fragmented, disunited, rudderless and leaderless opposition by inviting it to pit its larger-than-life Modi against the unifying opposition.

Government formation in 1996 happened after election results delivered a fragmented verdict, as Yechury explains it. In 1996, when H D Deve Gowda became prime minister, the process of selecting a person to fill the office began only after the elections were over. The opposition pulled together and created the United Front. In 1998, the Lok Sabha elections delivered an inconclusive verdict, and this led to the formation of the National Democratic Alliance headed by Atal Behari Vajpayee. In 2004, the United Progressive Alliance was created post the election results and Manmohan Singh became prime minister.

In 2014, the BJP switched strategy and propped up Modi as the prime minister candidate as part of its election campaign. It was a spectacularly successful strategy, and the BJP has not changed it and is unlikely to do so in 2024. The anti-BJP opposition's strategy of refusing to name a competitor to Modi has some advantages; the BJP can never be sure about the target of its attack strategy. Forced to attack all potential competitors to Modi as the likely opposition candidate for prime minister, the regime is being lured into adopting the overkill mode. The unleashing of the full power of the coercive apparatus of the State, through serial raids by "agencies", Enforcement Directorate, Income Tax, Central Bureau of Investigation, even National Investigation Agency, slapping sedition and UAPA cases against critics, is the Modi regime's response to a hydra-headed opposition that sprouts a head every time one is cut off.

The uncertainty about exactly how much unification of the opposition can actually challenge the Modi regime in the next rounds of state elections and then in 2024 remains. Its unpredictability can be a source of strength for the opposition, which is constantly shaping and reshaping the unification.

That same tentative process of grouping and regrouping can be maddening, if the rival prefers the certainties that flawless organisation and rigid discipline are designed to deliver, though that is rare. The BJP's response to Nitish Kumar's entry into opposition politics and his endorsement of an open ended process of alliance formation is a clue that the Sangh Parivar is deeply dissatisfied with the metamorphosis of the political landscape.

(Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist based in Kolkata)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.