Amid discordant notes, INDIA alliance maintains silence on fault lines that can widen

There was little ripple in the bloc on the repeated ED summons to Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren in a money laundering case and the surprise resignation of a Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) MLA that prompted the BJP to claim that Soren plans to resign and install his wife Kalpana Soren as his successor.

The JD(U)’s salvo at the Congress — its senior leader K C Tyagi has said the alliance is “running out of time and ideas”, that the grand old party has to show urgency to see a vibrant INDIA bloc, and that it should not have announced a yatra on its own — has been met with silence.

There is an interesting political backstory.

The JD(U) last week deftly let out that talks are on within the INDIA bloc on nominating Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar as the convener of the alliance and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge as the chairman. The Congress rubbished the reports while sources in the party say it was neither interested in the chairman’s post nor was it staking claiming for it.

The other parties were silent. The view is that the JD(U) is mounting pressure. Sources say the Trinamool Congress (TMC) is not really enthusiastic about Kumar as convener, leave aside Kharge as the chairman. The Congress, on the other hand, is not opposed to the idea of Kumar as convener if there is a consensus among the parties.

Even while acknowledging that they had received invitations for the Ram Temple inauguration on January 22, Kharge and the party’s Lok Sabha leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury were silent on whether they would attend or give it a miss. The party is divided on accepting or rejecting the invitation — a political minefield.

The Congress central leadership was also silent on Shiv Sena’s open claim for 23 seats in Maharashtra and the widening chasm between it and the TMC in West Bengal. The argument is that talks will take place behind closed doors and not through the media, perhaps the right approach at least on the vexed issue of seat sharing.

The Congress also ignored Arvind Kejriwal’s announcement that its jailed MLA Chaitar Vasava will be the party’s candidate from Bharuch in Gujarat for the Lok Sabha polls and the JD(U)’s declaration of its candidate for the Arunachal West Lok Sabha constituency.

Amid all this, the seat-sharing talks within the alliance have begun. Members of the Congress’s panel on alliance have formally met leaders of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the AAP and the party is working overtime for the rollout of Rahul Gandhi’s second yatra. The yatra could further expose the faultlines.

The question is whether Mamata Banerjee will join the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra when it crisscrosses Bengal. And will Nitish Kumar and Akhilesh Yadav associate with the yatra when it passes through Bihar and Uttar Pradesh? In Tyagi’s words, the yatra should have been an INDIA Yatra in which all top alliance leaders could have participated. The Congress, he said, did not consult any of its allies before charting its Yatra.

Some of the Opposition parties believe Lok Sabha elections could be announced soon after the opening of the Ram Temple, followed by the customary short Budget session of Parliament. They argue the Opposition is far from prepared, neither in terms of seat-sharing nor in terms of crafting a common narrative or agenda.

The parties in the Hindi heartland appear apprehensive about the political and electoral impact of the Ram Temple inauguration but are clearly struggling to find a compelling narrative that can offset the BJP’s Hindutva push. The Congress believes Rahul’s yatra will help it frame a narrative centred around livelihood issues such as unemployment and price rise to take on the BJP but many in the INDIA bloc remain unconvinced.

And the outcome of the seat-sharing talks will affect the joint campaign programmes that the alliance is planning in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.