Division Among India’s Political Parties Threatens To Dilute Opposition To Modi
Panelists, organizer, [and attendees from the Indian diaspora wait for Rahul Gandhi to arrive at an event held this year in New York City. (Photo by Manmeet Sahni)
India’s opposition has made significant strides to garner support as they recently banded together against the Hindu nationalist Modi government, but possible in-fighting may dull their efforts.
The Indian opposition has united under the banner “INDIA” (an acronym for Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance) to unseat Modi, who is set to run for a third term in the general elections in 2024.
In May, 26 political parties aligned for the cause, but just months after, there has been talk of political in-fighting. The alliance members have refuted these claims, calling it a move to sabotage their coalition by the ruling party.
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But there is some truth about the issues within the alliance as the Indian National Congress has been accused of focusing on the state assembly elections while neglecting and canceling INDIA alliance meetings. Some party leaders have also said they intend to prepare for the elections next year to win their seats and will discuss “seat-sharing” later.
Congress, the main opposition party in India, has been focused on shining light on the party and garnering support from and appealing to the Indian diaspora, who are invested in the country with cultural, familial and economic ties.
Modi opposition ‘united’
Rahul Gandhi said during his guest lecture at Stanford University in June that the opposition is “pretty well united.”
“I think it's getting more and more united. We're having conversations with all the opposition (parties). I think quite a lot of good work is happening,” he added. “It’s a complicated discussion because there are spaces where we have competing also with (other) opposition (parties). So, it's a little bit of give and take as required. But I'm confident that that will happen.”
The lecture was part of his six-day visit to the U.S., where Gandhi, 53, held public gatherings in San Francisco, Washington and New York ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit.
"The purpose of (Gandhi’s) trip is to connect, interact and begin a new conversation with various individuals, institutions and media, including the Indian diaspora that is growing in numbers in the United States and abroad to promote the shared values and vision of the real democracy with a focus on freedom, inclusion, sustainability, justice, peace and opportunities world over,” said Sam Pitroda, the Overseas Congress chairperson, in a statement.
Gandhi was met with a packed hall at the Javits Center in New York City. The zealous attendees from the Indian diaspora in the New York metropolitan area cheered him on as he called for building a shop of love in this marketplace of hatred — “nafrat ki bazaar mein muhabbat ki dukaan” — referring to the rise in communal hatred in India.
“There is no freedom of speech; you can’t comfortably say what you like,” said Satvinder Singh, a truck driver and an attendee at the event. “If you do say something, you're quickly snubbed. People are struggling so much to fight for their basic rights. If people want these rights back, we need to move, and Congress seems to be the best alternative.”
Gandhi, who is at the helm representing Congress in these events, has been diligently working on garnering people's trust and, in the process, also improving his public image.
BJP and the media have often dismissed Gandhi as an oblivious figure, calling him “pappu” — a Hindu word meaning “small boy’ — although these attempts to rebrand his image and the Congress party’s image have not gone unnoticed.
Gandhi said in his Stanford University lecture: “The entire opposition is struggling in India. Huge financial dominance. Institutional capture. We’re struggling to fight the democratic fight in our country.”
He stated that this struggle moved him, and he decided to go on a 136-day journey, “Bharat Jodo Yatra” (Unite India). The mobilization culminated in January and spanned 12 states, covering 2,218 miles, some by foot.
“Bharat Jodo Yatra is a movement to march against the neglect of people's aspirations by the government,” according to the movement’s website. “The socio-cultural fabric of India has been torn apart by divisive forces. Our economy is collapsing. Price rise and unemployment have turned people's hope into despair.”
Many grassroots organizations and opposition party members joined the “yatra” — in Indian-origin religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, generally meaning a pilgrimage to a holy site — to show solidarity with the movement.
Panelists and organizers with Rahul Gandhi this past June at a public event held at the Javits Center in New York. (Photo by Manmeet Sahni)
Focus on next year’s elections
The move paid off as Congress won the state legislative assembly elections in one of the key BJP-ruling states, Karnataka, by a landslide this past May. Of the 224-member legislature, Congress won 135 seats, while BJP bagged only 66 seats in the southern state.
Congress also scored a big win last year in the north, winning Himachal Pradesh. The victory in the southern state, which once was a BJP hub, is a big upset that sets the course for the ongoing and remaining state polls ahead of the parliamentary elections slated for April and May 2024.
However, the slow rise in public trust for Gandhi for the top post has not affected Modi's steady popularity, according to a social and political survey conducted last spring by Lokniti, a Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, initiative. The poll accounted for 7,202 electors at 282 polling stations who were spread across 71 assembly constituencies of 19 states and were randomly selected.
The survey findings illuminated a pro-Modi stance. For one of the survey questions, “If Lok Sabha elections are held in the country tomorrow, who would you prefer to see as the Prime Minister of the country?” 43.4% of respondents said they would vote for Modi, while 26.8% said Gandhi.
“Suppose (national elections) are held tomorrow; which party would you vote for?” The response: 39% said the BJP, 29% opted for the Congress and the remaining parties and 4% chose not to respond.
In the 2018 state elections, the ruling party suffered enormous defeats, even in the so-called Hindi belt, but emerged with a landslide win in the general elections the following year.
A political analysis gauged the vote share in 2018 in the three states of Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, part of the Hindi belt. Congress won about 54% of the seats, up 22% from 2013, and BJP’s numbers plummeted from 72% to 38%. BJP lost 224 seats, of which 191 went to Congress.
“Since it is crucial for the party to win a high number of seats in the Hindi heartland at the forthcoming national elections, the results suggest that the fight for 2019 is more open than previously thought, despite the fact that Narendra Modi’s party remain the frontrunner,” said Diego Maiorano, a political analyst and a visiting research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies who authored the analysis.
Economic issues such as poverty, unemployment, price rise and corruption were among some of the key concerns ahead of next year’s elections, according to Lokniti's survey.
It also found that 38.9% of respondents could not cope financially.
"All the promises Mr. Modi made in the previous elections, they have merely been put in a showcase when you talk about smart cities or jobs; this has all become media propaganda,” Singh said.
A recent analysis by The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news outlet, found that BJP had renamed at least 19 government policies set in motion by opposition ruling parties but had claimed them as its own. The analysis also reflected on the lack of implementation in many of these appropriated government schemes and policies.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been in power since 2014. (Wikipedia Commons photo)
Continued threats to religious freedom
Modi’s Hindutva politics are widely known and have often been criticized, with India in red on several world indexes, including the World Religious Freedom and the World Press Freedom Index.
Reporters Without Borders’ global press freedom index shows India has been slipping since Modi came to power. The South Asian country now ranks 161st out of 180 countries monitored and has been deemed one of the most “dangerous” countries for practicing journalism.
The government also came under fire for its recent attempt at rewriting Indian history by altering and omitting critical historical events like the ban on Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, along with multiple references to the 2002 Gujarat riots where Modi is implicated. These were purged from the texts, with changes being made to the Mughal history references.
India has seen bloodshed along religious lines since its independence. The mobs have killed non-Hindu communities for several decades against Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. But the danger lies in the extreme polarization and intolerance that have risen unprecedentedly during the last decade under the leadership of the Modi-led BJP.
“India has done better in the past and has to change course because the cycle of downward spiral in a country of that importance and the number of people who are involved,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. “It is quite frightening.”
He added, “Religious discrimination should not be a matter of national pride.”
In its 2023 annual report, the USCIRF also recommended that India be added to the U.S. government’s list of countries of particular concern because of the worsening limits on religious freedom.
It remains to be seen if Modi's ethno-nationalist government can stay in power for a third time and whether India’s opposition parties can stop him.
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Manmeet Sahni is an independent journalist from New Delhi based in New York. She writes about politics, human rights, inequality and social movements. Her bylines have appeared in Documented, The Article and others, and she is an alumna of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.