INDIA Bloc leaders meet today amid friction, and a bundle of contradictions

After a gap of over a year, top leaders of various INDIA bloc parties are scheduled to meet on Saturday (July 19) evening to “discuss the prevailing political situation in the country”. The meeting will be held online to allow wider participation of allies who had expressed their inability to be present in New Delhi on Saturday for the talks that were to be hosted initially at the official residence of Mallikarjun Kharge, the Congress president and Rajya Sabha’s Leader of Opposition.

AAP will not participate

With the exception of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which had announced its exit from the coalition ahead of this year’s Delhi assembly polls, chiefs of all other allied parties have “either confirmed their participation in the meeting or assured us that they will depute a representative,” Congress sources said.

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It is learnt that Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, Tamil Nadu chief minister and DMK chief MK Stalin, RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, Jharkhand chief minister and JMM chief Hemant Soren, and Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray are among the senior alliance leaders who will be joining the virtual meet. While the NCP-SP and National Conference have also confirmed participation, it is unclear if these would be represented by their chiefs, Sharad Pawar and Farooq Abdullah, respectively, or by other party leaders.

Relief for Congress

The biggest relief for the Congress, however, has come from Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee. After having declined the invite initially citing prior engagements of herself and her party brass, Congress sources said Banerjee said her party will be part of the meeting, with its national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee being deputed.

Banerjee’s acceptance of the invite is significant as her party had, for months, been questioning the Congress’s centrality to the Opposition bloc. Trinamool leaders such as Kalyan Banerjee had even publicly asserted that the Congress must cede its assumed leadership of the alliance to the mercurial Bengal chief minister.

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Getting the Trinamool on-board makes for good optics for the unsteady Opposition alliance ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament that begins on July 21. However, Opposition leaders The Federal spoke to cautioned that the success of the conclave shouldn’t be determined by the number of participants but by what the discussions yield.

Time for introspection

“Those attending have a simple question to ask themselves and each other – is this alliance meant only for coordinating strategy inside Parliament or does it still hold true to the cause with which it was built, which was to counter the BJP both inside Parliament and outside it. The Lok Sabha elections proved the strength of the alliance in taking down the BJP, but over the last year we have completely lost that momentum,” a senior Lok Sabha MP from the Congress told The Federal.

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Noting that Saturday’s meeting is the first that the top leadership of the alliance is having since June last year, the Congress MP quoted above added, “there is an urgent need to sort out differences, maintain this dialogue, rebuild the alliance, and come up with an actionable blueprint that goes beyond cornering the government when Parliament is in session”.

Lost momentum

That the alliance lost steam over the past year has been evident for months, and multiple Opposition leaders have, both publicly and behind closed doors, expressed their unease over the breakdown in communication among INDIA bloc leaders. The tensions within the alliance have been further exacerbated by the uptick in BJP’s electoral fortunes following the setbacks it suffered during the Lok Sabha polls. The BJP’s stunning electoral triumphs in Haryana, Maharashtra, and Delhi have allowed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his colleagues to paint the Lok Sabha losses as a stumble and not the fall that the Opposition was ecstatic over.

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A senior Samajwadi Party leader told The Federal that while it was natural for issues concerning the upcoming Parliament session to dominate the discourse at Saturday’s meet, it would “be a lost opportunity” if those attending the virtual session “do not address larger concerns about the future and sustainability of the INDIA bloc”.

Agenda for meeting

Congress leaders concede that the agenda for the meeting was largely packed with issues that the party feels must be raised by the alliance’s leaders during the Monsoon Session. This includes the Centre’s failure in preventing the Pahalgam terror attack, the opaque manner in which a ceasefire was abruptly declared when the Indian Armed Forces were dominating over Pakistan during Operation Sindoor, US President Donald Trump’s claim of using the threat of trade to force India into accepting the ceasefire and his tariff threats, the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar, restoration of statehood for Jammu and Kashmir, and the alleged isolation of India on the world stage, among others.

Pramod Tiwari, Congress’ deputy leader in Rajya Sabha said that Congress’s allies will “also have their own issues, issues specific to different states” which could also be discussed.

Alliance’s future course

A section of the INDIA bloc leaders, including those from the Congress, believes the litany of issues that the Congress leadership already has in mind to take up during the meeting may leave little scope to discuss the “more consequential” matter of the alliance’s future course.

“If the agenda is merely to discuss what issues the alliance should corner the government over in Parliament, then we are totally off-course. This agenda can easily be taken up by Khargeji by calling floor leaders of various INDIA parties as he used to do during earlier Parliament sessions. When you are calling top leaders, the discussion also has to go beyond the Parliament session. In this, it is the responsibility of the Congress to ensure that the scope of discussions is not limited,” an RJD MP said.

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“The country is already going back to the same situation where we were before the 2024 elections – investigation agencies have begun to hound Opposition leaders again, social and communal harmony is being disturbed, unconstitutional laws are being brought and passed in a more sinister way than before by getting Parliamentary committees to endorse them and now with this Bihar SIR, there is a threat of upending democracy totally with the help of the Election Commission. The INDIA bloc was formed because the Opposition wanted to stop the BJP from doing these very things; we will be doing great injustice to the country if we decide that we will raise these issues collectively only when Parliament is in session and after that we will go our separate ways till the next session is convened,” the RJD MP added.

Unease with Rahul’s functioning

Some alliance leaders also expressed unease with the way Rahul Gandhi has been functioning as Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition.

“He (Rahul) needs to realise that his responsibility to keep the Opposition together is now way more than what it was before the last Lok Sabha elections. He needs to maintain a constant line of communication with Opposition leaders whether Parliament is in session or not. Today he made certain comments about the CPM which forced the CPM to issue a strong rebuttal. Now tomorrow he has to sit with leaders of the same CPM at the INDIA Bloc meeting. What will he say? He has to be more responsible, and when the session begins, he has to show more interest in what is happening in the Lok Sabha,” said an INDIA bloc MP from a southern state.

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On Friday (July 18), during a visit to Kerala, Rahul triggered a strong backlash from the CPM after he likened the Left party with the RSS-BJP claiming both “do not have feelings for the people” and that he fought both the RSS and the CPM in the “realm of ideology”.

The CPM shot back saying Rahul’s comments equating the party with the RSS were “absurd and condemnable” and that the Congress leader and his party echo the RSS “in expressing anti-communist sentiments”.

Testing time in Kerala, Bengal

Congress leaders, the Federal spoke to, said a bitter verbal exchange between the party and the CPM in Kerala is “not new and will only get louder” in the run-up to the Kerala assembly polls due next year as the parties are principal rivals of each other in the state. However, they also conceded that Rahul “could have avoided” the comparison he made between the CPM and the RSS, especially when the Left parties have been invited to attend Saturday’s alliance meeting.

Also Read: Cracks appear in India bloc as it demands Parliament session over Op Sindoor, ceasefire

“These are issues Rahul needs to navigate more carefully. It will be a testing time for the alliance next year because both Kerala and Bengal will go to the polls around the same time. In Kerala, the Congress and the Left Front will face off against each other while in Bengal they may ally against the Trinamool, which is also in the INDIA bloc. The BJP will have a field day exploiting this, calling it hypocrisy of our alliance,” said a Congress leader from Bengal.