Terms of Trade | Bharat Jodo vs Make India #1: The race for No.2 position begins

One can describe this as the beginning of the contest for the principal opposition party in the 2024 elections. Here’s why.

Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi started his Bharat Jodo Yatra this week from Kanyakumari, India’s southernmost town. The week also saw Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Admi Party (AAP) launching the party’s Make India Number One campaign from Haryana, the state between Delhi and Punjab, the two states where AAP is running state governments.

The more difficult question to answer is which party will finish as the number two?  (Sanjeev Verma/AAP Media)

Is there a larger takeaway from these political events? One can describe this as the beginning of the contest for the principal opposition party in the 2024 elections. Here’s why.

Even the most optimistic anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) voices will not deny that, irrespective of whether or not it crosses the halfway mark of 272 (it looks set to), the BJP is bound to finish as the single largest party in the 2024 general elections. The BJP, of course, given the relentless electoral machine that it is, believes that it can improve on its 2019 tally of 303.

The more difficult question to answer is which party will finish as the number two? The Congress, of course, continues to believe that it is the principal challenger to the BJP. However, there is more than one non-Congress politician within the opposition ranks who believes that they can, and that they deserve to, finish ahead of the Congress.

The AAP is one such party. After having dislodged the Congress from power in Delhi and Punjab, it has now set its eyes on Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, two states where the Congress is the main opposition to the BJP. Whether or not the AAP believes it can surge ahead of the Congress in 2024, it definitely harbours ambitions of becoming an all-India party.

Then there is the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal, which will be hoping to garner most of the 42 Lok Sabha seats in its home state. It has not lost an opportunity to land a punch on the Congress in the recent past. However, for regional parties such as the TMC, the chances of political success outside their state are limited.

To be sure, there are still leaders within the opposition ranks, who believe that pursuing an all-in-unity tactics against the BJP is a worthy cause. The latest and perhaps the most important champion of this cause is Nitish Kumar, who has been the chief minister of Bihar, almost continuously, since 2005.

It will be politically naïve to believe that the ongoing churn in India’s opposition space will be settled through negotiations in sanitised spaces of Lutyens’ Delhi. Every state election until the 2024 general election is likely to be a show of strength for the opposition parties and their performance in these contests will play an important role in shaping not just the pre-poll alliances for 2024 but also the political discourse in the country.

The Congress, by investing everything in Rahul Gandhi’s Yatra has clearly indicated that it has decided to pursue a two-pronged line of attack on the BJP. While it will continue to raise economic issues, both in terms of attacking the BJP government and making promises in poll-bound states, secularism has come back on the Congress’s agenda in a big way. Rahul Gandhi embarking on a protest march to “unite the country” in 2022 is a very different person from the one who started his Gujarat campaign from the Dwarka temple in September 2017.

What exactly does the Congress expect to gain from this exercise?

The immediate gain is a sort of legitimacy within India’s (culturally not economic) left-leaning civil society landscape (and via it, society at large). While Gandhi has been criticised for pursuing this constituency by many, including his own (many of whom are now former) party colleagues, he seems to have made up his mind. To be sure, this is not an entirely new experiment for the Congress party. Ahmed Patel, the now deceased lieutenant of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, cultivated a similar civil society eco-system for the Congress to take on the BJP’s hegemony before 2004. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but maybe the Gandhis believe that it is impossible for the Congress to take on the BJP without rejuvenating this ecosystem.

The second dividend for the Congress could be a rejuvenation of its support base among India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims. Muslims deserted the Congress for regional parties in many states in the 1990s after the rise of the BJP, and especially after the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992. This is especially true in the Mandal belt of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. However, with the BJP firmly in control in Uttar Pradesh and the entire opposition increasingly finding it difficult to challenge the BJP’s Hindutva agenda, lest they lose Hindu votes, the sense of discomfort, restlessness and the feeling of being abandoned by the so-called secular parties among the minorities is quite palpable. It is exactly this feeling which is helping parties such as the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen in many Muslim dominated constituencies. Will Muslims respond favourably to the Congress for bringing back the agenda of secularism and communal harmony into politics? One will have to wait and see.

An even bigger question is whether the majority community will further desert the Congress for raising the flag of secularism.

Around 10% of Gujarat’s population is Muslim and if one is to assume that they do not vote for the BJP in significant numbers, then it is around one-fourth of the Congress’s support base in the state. While the AAP has been very proactive in trying to replace the Congress as the main challenger to the BJP in the state, it has kept absolutely quiet on the Muslim question. The biggest proof of this is its complete silence on the remission granted to convicts in the BIlkis Bano gang rape case, which has attracted a lot of criticism from civil society and opposition ranks. AAP’s rhetoric, even in places like Delhi, is not very different — it switches between tacit silence on communal issues to even trying to outflank the BJP from the right. The Jahangirpuri riots and the recent controversy after a union minister’s tweet about giving homes to Rohingya refugees are clear examples of the latter. To be sure, the AAP’s posturing on the communalism question is mostly a reactive tactic and when it comes to seeking votes, it relies more on its ‘Delhi model’ of promising welfare benefits and overhauling social services such as health and education. This is what the AAP is planning to sell in its campaign. Its belief, of course, is that Muslims will rally behind it because they see the AAP as the strongest force to defeat the BJP.

If the Congress is unable to hold on to its Hindu support base in Gujarat, and the AAP ends up as the primary beneficiary of this erosion, then one can legitimately argue that the Congress’s tactics of championing secularism is not working. In fact, it will not be an exaggeration to argue that if the AAP manages to leave the Congress behind in Gujarat, then national politics, at least within the opposition space, will undergo a significant churn. Not only will the AAP’s claims of emerging as the alternative to the Congress gain more credibility, so will the political tactic of promising better upward mobility through state support than secularism. A credible performance in Gujarat by the Congress, will of course, be a vindication of the party’s and Rahul Gandhi’s political strategy and will rejuvenate the communal harmony/secular discourse in politics.

In fact, one can argue that many anti-BJP regional parties are hedging their bets between the AAP and the Congress despite strained ties between the two. For example, both Nitish Kumar and Stalin have continued to maintain cordial ties with the AAP even though they are in alliance with the Congress in their respective states. It is more than clear that the AAP and the Congress do not share a good relationship.

Even as it continues to attack what it calls the ‘pseudo-secularism’ of the Congress, the BJP is careful to not let the AAP’s challenge go unanswered. The fact that the union cabinet has launched the PM-SHRI scheme to develop 14000 schools across the country is a proof of this. The optics of the AAP government in Delhi showcasing its government schools have played a significant role in building its political brand. By creating such schools in every district in the country, the BJP is clearly hoping to counter AAP’s claims of being the only party which cares about such issues.

Of course, if both the AAP and the Congress end up doing very badly in Gujarat, then the opposition camp is likely to fall into disarray in the run up to 2024 elections.

To be sure, it will be naïve on part of the Congress, AAP and other opposition parties to believe that the intra-opposition competition will be allowed to happen on a politically benign turf. Not only is the BJP making all efforts to retain its current political dominance, it is also becoming more and more ruthless in its pursuit. From Amit Shah’s statement in Mumbai, where he asked the voters to punish Uddhav Thackeray for backstabbing the BJP to the growing allegations of enforcement agencies being used selectively against the opposition, the signs of BJP upping the ante against the opposition are clearly visible. The only political unknown at the moment is whether the BJP’s squeeze will trigger a coming together of all major opposition parties before 2024. While it seems unlikely at the moment, history teaches us one should rule out nothing in Indian politics.

Every Friday, HT’s data and political economy editor, Roshan Kishore, combines his commitment to data and passion for qualitative analysis in a column for HT Premium, Terms of Trade. With a focus on one big number and one big issue, he will go behind the headlines to ask a question and address political economy issues and social puzzles facing contemporary India.

The views expressed are personal