As Modi 3.0 turns one, growing discord, flailing unity erode INDIA bloc

On June 3, leaders of 16 parties of the Opposition’s INDIA bloc wrote a joint letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanding a special session of Parliament to discuss issues linked with the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack and India’s subsequent retaliation against Pakistan through Operation Sindoor.

Also read | Year 1 of Modi 3.0: PM calls the shots as powerful allies remain non-assertive

Notwithstanding that the Centre rejected the demand and instead announced the schedule for Parliament’s monsoon session, the INDIA bloc initiative of June 3 was significant but for all the wrong reasons for the Opposition’s collective.

Fissures exposed

The Opposition leaders had come together for a joint initiative under the INDIA banner for the first time in months. Yet, what could have been a moment to stabilise and strengthen in public estimation a teetering alliance only ended up exposing the fissures that have deepened in the INDIA bloc over the past six months.

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of Arvind Kejriwal, still nursing its electoral wounds from the Delhi Assembly defeat to which its former INDIA ally, the Congress, contributed significantly, refused to be a signatory to the letter signed by 16 other bloc members.

Senior Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien, whose party has no love lost for the Congress or the alliance, informed the media that the AAP would write to the prime minister separately.

AAP MP Sanjay Singh justified his party’s move by saying that “the INDIA alliance ended with the Lok Sabha elections”. His colleague and former Delhi chief minister Atishi has, since, gone a step further and exhorted Opposition parties to “think about” forming a third front, excluding the Congress, as “there is an unstated alliance between the Congress and the BJP”.

Sharad Pawar’s NCP-SP, another key constituent of the bloc, didn’t sign the letter either. Pawar’s daughter and Baramati MP Supriya Sule, back to India after heading an all-party delegation that visited foreign nations to canvass for the Modi-fied “new normal” in India-Pakistan ties, claimed she had “asked a senior Congress leader to wait till the delegations concluded their mission abroad”. Her request, evidently, fell on deaf ears.

Euphoria over

As such, a meeting meant to showcase unity ended up highlighting the growing schism within the INDIA bloc. That this happened days before Modi completed the first year of his current term in office – he took oath as Prime Minister for the third time on June 9 last year – was a bonus for the BJP.

A year ago, despite the glaring contradictions, brittle egos, pulls and pressures that were apparent within it since the alliance began to take shape in June 2023, the INDIA bloc had brought the BJP’s brute majority of the previous decade down to a minority of 240 seats in the Lok Sabha.

For the first time since 2014, the Opposition had humbled Modi despite his eventual victory as the seemingly invincible Premier was now dependent on the crutches of allies.

A year on, the euphoria of that victory-like defeat is over.

Seams are frayed

The cautious Congress veteran P Chidambaram, who unlike many of his party colleagues has a reputation for weighing the implications of his words before uttering them, prophesised at an event in Delhi last month that the future of the bloc “is not so bright”.

Doubting “if the alliance is totally intact,” the former Union minister had noted, “It shows at the seams that it is frayed”.

Also read | 'Congress has no future': BJP gloats over Chidambaram's INDIA Bloc remarks

The electoral muscle of the INDIA coalition had begun to atrophy within the first four months following the Lok Sabha poll results. The BJP scripted unexpected yet massive victories in the Assembly polls in Haryana, Maharashtra and the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir (though the INDIA bloc’s National Conference managed to form government in the UT) while the Opposition collective continued to bicker, often publicly.

The saffron juggernaut continued to roll at the hustings in early 2025 too with the party decimating the AAP to comprehensively win Delhi after a gap of 27 years.

Deepening fault lines

The inability of the INDIA bloc’s largest constituent, the Congress party, to halt the BJP’s march in largely bipolar contests across Haryana and the Jammu region and its decision to prioritise its own revival over the alliance’s unity in Delhi deepened the fault lines which the Lok Sabha results had somewhat glossed over.

The TMC began demanding that the Congress should step aside as the de facto fulcrum of the bloc and formally anoint Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee as the alliance’s face.

In successive Parliament sessions, Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s obsession with attacking Modi over his links to controversial business tycoon Gautam Adani alienated leaders from the Trinamool, Samajwadi Party, NCP-SP, the Left parties and the AAP.

These parties believed the Congress-led ruckus was preventing them from cornering the government over “real issues” concerning the different states they represent.

Feeble attempts

Since December, meetings of INDIA bloc leaders to press for a common cause against Modi and his government have been few and far between. The only notable effort at presenting a united front by the alliance has been its failed bid last December for the removal of Jagdeep Dhankhar as Vice President and Chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

Other attempts such as the alliance’s push in April seeking repeal of a limited part of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act or the latest initiative of June 3 to demand a special session of Parliament have only exposed further divisions in the ranks.

UPA coalition’s version

“The INDIA bloc is now confined to the imagination of a few; it simply doesn’t exist on the ground anymore... whatever is left of it is actually a version of the UPA coalition that INDIA was supposed to be an upgraded version of,” a senior Congress leader, who was one of the party’s mediators for the alliance during the Lok Sabha polls, told The Federal.

The Congress leader explained further, “The alliances that were there in Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Jharkhand, J&K (all of the UPA-era) or to some extent in Maharashtra are still around; the understanding with AAP is over for all practical purposes. The SP-Congress alliance in UP, I am afraid, is also not as intact as it may seem. As for Mamata di, right from the beginning, her party (Trinamool Congress) was part of the alliance only on paper; she made it very clear that in Bengal, she would not give space to any other INDIA party”.

Also read | INDIA bloc cries hoarse over CEC selection, but lacks strategy to secure electoral interests

Multiple INDIA bloc leaders The Federal spoke to conceded that for months there had been a “breakdown of communication” among top leaders of the alliance’s constituents. “Except for a handful of issues, there has been no effort by anyone to work as an alliance... As the largest party in the bloc, the Congress should have made efforts to revive dialogue but it didn’t,” a Samajwadi Party leader, who was a regular at INDIA bloc meetings till last August, told The Federal.

Communication breakdown

A senior MP from the RJD, however, said he would “not want to fault any single party for the situation we find ourselves in today because if the Congress wasn’t taking the initiative, some other senior leader of the alliance should have done so.”

Sources in the alliance blamed this “communication breakdown” for the INDIA bloc’s “complete failure” in cornering the Modi regime in the aftermath of the hurried India-Pakistan ceasefire announcement that came within three days of Operation Sindoor’s launch and at a time when the Indian Armed Forces appeared to have gained a “decisive edge” over their Pakistani counterparts.

After the April 22 Pahalgam attack by Pakistani terrorists, which was followed on May 7 by India’s Operation Sindoor, the Opposition stood firmly behind the government to exact retribution from Pakistan.

The government, however, refused to extend the same courtesy to the Opposition when it came to taking the latter into confidence on issues arising out of the Pahalgam attack and the ceasefire announcement.

The Prime Minister continued to score political points over his INDIA rivals. Through the past month, while Opposition leaders on all-party delegations were travelling the globe doing Modi’s bidding, the Prime Minister was going around the country claiming credit for Operation Sindoor and reviving his muscular image that his friend and US President Donald Trump had somewhat dented by repeatedly asserting that he used the threat of stopping US trade with India and Pakistan to force the two countries into accepting a ceasefire.

No initiative by Cong

INDIA bloc leaders told The Federal that throughout the Pahalgam attack and Operation Sindoor episodes, there was “no attempt by the Congress leadership” to speak to allies and decide a joint course of action for “seeking accountability from the government”.

“The joint appeal of a special session of Parliament should have been made immediately after Trump claimed he mediated the ceasefire but then there was no attempt by the Congress leadership to get the allies on board for this even when the issue was raised by several Opposition parties during the all-party meeting chaired by (defence minister) Rajnath Singh.

In Parliament, both LoPs are from the Congress, the Congress is also the largest Opposition party; it should have reached out immediately to chiefs of other INDIA parties and got them to back the special session demand,” a CPM MP told The Federal.

Also read | Delhi polls: Behind Rahul’s barbs at Kejriwal lies Congress’ resolve for revival

Another SP leader said, “The inaction of the INDIA bloc allowed the government time to recover from the setback that came from Trump. Once the all-party delegations were announced, we knew the time for a special session was over. The delegations could have gone after a special session was held but no pressure was put on the government for this.”

With the monsoon session now scheduled to begin on July 25, INDIA bloc leaders can only hope that they will get time to question the government when Parliament meets. Opposition leaders, however, point out that Rahul Gandhi’s “Narendra-Surrender” jibe at the PM, which most INDIA bloc parties have already distanced from, has prepared the ground for a “disruptive” session.

Tough road ahead

With the next 12 months packed with key Assembly elections in Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Bengal and Assam, INDIA bloc leaders expect a mixed bag of unity and discord for the alliance.

The alliance appears stable in Bihar and Tamil Nadu while in Bengal, Mamata is expected to continue firing salvos not just at the BJP but also INDIA bloc’s Congress and Left parties. In Kerala, anyway, the Left parties and the Congress are pitted directly against each other while in Assam, it remains to be seen if the Congress can rekindle an alliance with smaller regional players.

The road ahead, however, remains rocky for the alliance and particularly for the Congress. If the BJP-led NDA succeeds in retaining Bihar yet again later this year and Assam next year while making any gains in Bengal, Tamil Nadu or Kerala (in the latter two, the saffron party is consistently already working on pre-poll ties ups and public outreach), the Opposition’s INDIA dream could become hard to sustain.