Opinion Vandita Mishra writes: A good week for the Opposition

On Saturday, Congress finalised a Lok Sabha seat-sharing arrangement with the AAP in Delhi and Gujarat, Haryana, Goa and Chandigarh. On Wednesday, it stitched a pact with the Samajwadi Party in UP and MP. The Supreme Court quashed the results of the mayoral election in Chandigarh on Tuesday, unseating the BJP’s mayor and ruling in favour of the Congress-AAP candidate. And the farmers’ agitation remained in the headlines, after farmer unions rejected the government’s offer on Monday.

What is more, this week’s bounty for the Opposition — the clearing of crucial hurdles for a joint fight against the BJP and the apex court’s calling out of the BJP attempt to hijack an election amid the return of an older impasse to haunt its government — followed the setting aside of the Modi government’s electoral bonds scheme by the Supreme Court in a landmark verdict the preceding week.

And yet, Opposition parties are not talking up their good news, nor is the ruling BJP showing signs of being ill at ease.

It could be that Congress and its allies realise that a long distance remains to be covered if the seat-sharing deals, for instance, are to work on the ground. While getting the leaders of the AAP and Congress, or SP and Congress, to agree to agree is a major achievement, given their competing and conflicting interests and the innate anti-Congressism of the smaller parties, the task of getting workers on both sides to take their leaders’ cue remains to be done.

Celebrations in the INDIA camp may also be premature because seat-sharing pacts are still to be worked out in crucial states, be it in West Bengal with Mamata Banerjee who is known to drive a hard bargain, or in Maharashtra where the Shiv Sena and NCP are battling internal insecurities, having been split into two already.

The fact also is that there is little or no evidence yet that the BJP’s disregard for due process in its bid to carve out electoral wins, of the kind that invited the Court’s wrath in Chandigarh, or its use of governmental power to skew the playing field in its own favour by the electoral bonds scheme, or, for that matter, its continued wielding of agencies to target its opponents — former Delhi Deputy Chief Minister and senior AAP leader Manish Sisodia completes one year in jail without bail tomorrow, Monday — are striking sparks among the people.

An Opposition caught up in the to-and-fro of negotiating and bargaining with each other in the run-up to polls can ill afford to lose sight of the fact that its real test, its real moment of reckoning, is people-facing.

To begin with, Congress needs to acknowledge that its decline preceded the BJP’s rise, and that well before the Modi-BJP replaced it as the centrepiece of the one-party-dominance system, it had been ceding ground to a breakaway here, a regional party there, because it was losing its ability to talk to the voters in a changing country.

The retreat of Congress and other parties from many spaces important in ordinary citizens’ lifeworlds created a vacuum that was filled by the BJP — the coming together of these parties, therefore, to take on the BJP electorally is unlikely to turn back the clock in terms of the ground lost in terms of the narrative and the story.

The battle for the vote is about money and resources and control over institutions — and in all these, the BJP has pushed ahead of its competitors, by fair and foul means. But the democratic battle is also a contest of imaginations — here, if the BJP has had a walkover, its rivals and competitors have themselves to blame mostly.

The Modi-BJP’s storytelling — weaving in past grievance and aspirations for the future, crafting larger events and wholes and connecting individuals with them, projecting a sense of constant change and forward movement, engendering a sense of belonging and loyalty — has simply been far ahead of that of its opponents. It has expertly folded in community and nation, caste and religion — while crudely excluding and othering the religious minority.

In their response, the Congress and other parties have been self-absorbed and complacent. For the most part, they have roused themselves only to try and punch holes in the BJP’s stories. They have disdained, not reached out to persuade, those giving the BJP a hearing.

Even when the non-BJP parties have told their own stories, they have either, as in the case of regional parties, been much more narrowly pitched, or, as in the case of Congress, attempted to paper over the cracks within with sanctimonious platitudes, evading the hard work of a genuinely inclusive politics.

And so it is that even at the end of a week such as this one, in which everything seemed to be going well for the Opposition, the BJP doesn’t really look shaky, and the Opposition can ill afford to look pleased.