In February this year, Congress appealed to the divine. All its candidates in Goa were shepherded, with great show, by the party’s central leaders to a temple, church and a dargah to take a pledge of loyalty that they will not leave the party after the Assembly elections due in March. Eleven of them won their seats. On Wednesday, eight of them, including seven-time MLA and former chief minister Digambar Kamat, joined the BJP. When reminded of that pledge, Kamat invoked God. “I went to the temple again and asked God what to do. God told me do whatever is best for you.” Fidelity to a party or an ideology is rare in Goan politics: centred around leaders who command a few thousand votes in tiny constituencies, it has allowed legislators to party-hop brazenly without facing the censure of their voters. However, the latest cross-over in Goa, which follows similar developments in Arunachal Pradesh (2018), Karnataka (2019), Madhya Pradesh (2020), West Bengal (2021), Gujarat (2018-19) etc., deepen a vulnerability in the political system.
For, at its heart lies the inability of the opposition parties to keep their flock together in the face of the BJP’s predatory instinct to expand its footprint and win new territories. It is disturbing, of course, that the ruling party, in the event of its winning no majority or only a thin majority in an election, wants to overturn that mandate in its pursuit of total domination of the polity: The BJP’s slogan since 2014 — Congress-mukt Bharat — seems to have transformed into Opposition-mukt Bharat. However, none of the Opposition leaders is a political spring chicken, it will be lazy and wrong on the part of the Opposition to lay all the blame at the doors of the BJP behemoth. It is increasingly evident that the only glue that seems to be holding the non-BJP parties together is power, since these outfits have long transformed into fiefs of individual leaders and their families rather than grass-roots political organisations built around ideologies that have an ear to the ground and know how to work in defeat and hibernation. In the case of the Congress, which has been bleeding cadres and leaders across India, the crisis has also been organisational — a rudderless central leadership is unable to inspire or consolidate the party’s declining support base.
Clearly, the inflow into the BJP is as much a result of the Opposition’s failure to offer hope to ambitious leaders in its ranks as it is the outcome of the former’s approach of winner should take it all. The anti-defection law, legislated in the 1980s with the aim to discourage political defections, has in the process lost its edge as legislators are either shifting in large groups even at the risk of getting disqualified. Aya Ram Gaya Ram was coined way back in the late 1960s to reflect the shifting winds in Haryana’s local politics but, clearly, the challenge now is deeper — and national.
