June has been the cruelest month for India’s Opposition, dealing a body blow to two parties in Bengal and Maharashtra.
First the Trinamool Congress and later this month the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT) MPs moved away from their respective parent parties to ease pressure on the ruling NDA led by the BJP.
The Shiv Sena has been hit twice by the defection bomb. Four years ago, Uddhav Thackeray first had to step down as chief minister when MLAs led by Eknath Shinde revolted. This week, six of the nine MLAs elected to Lok Sabha on a Shiv Sena (UBT) ticket from the Mahavikas Aghadi (MVA) platform jumped ship.
Arvind Sawant, the Mumbai South MP from the Shiv Sena (UBT) who led the party in Lok Sabha till the recent defections, said it was time for the people to hit the streets.
“If political parties turn into commodities, who is going to stand for the people? People should come on the roads. The judiciary is supposed to protect but is watching silently while the Constitution is being butchered. EVMs were burned in Bengal,” Sawant told The Telegraph Online.
A senior MP belonging to the Opposition bloc told The Telegraph Online on Saturday there was little the opposition parties could do about the breakneck speed at which the ruling BJP at the Centre has managed two major coups in two political parties.
“There is no way we can resist. In Jharkhand, we [the Opposition] had the numbers, yet we lost in the Rajya Sabha polls. Madhya Pradesh is a classic example of how a quasi-legal instrument can be used to deny a candidate her seat,” the MP said.
The euphoria from two summers ago when the INDIA bloc restricted the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah led-BJP to 240 seats in Lok Sabha has long since evaporated.
The victory cries from the night of April 18, when the Opposition rallied together to halt the Narendra Modi government from securing the passage of three bills – the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, Delimitation Bill and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill—have also faded.
The push has only gained strength as the days passed with a pending question: Who comes next? The Samajwadi Party with 37 MPs in the Lok Sabha and four in the Rajya Sabha? Or the DMK which has 22 Lok Sabha MPs and eight in the Upper House?
These are the two remaining “big” parties in the INDIA bloc. The DMK has been sulking ever since the Congress walked out of their alliance immediately after the former lost the Tamil Nadu Assembly polls.
A section of the BJP in Delhi has signalled that it is trying to woo the DMK, a party that vehemently opposed some policies of the Modi government, especially delimitation, when it was in power in Tamil Nadu.
The DMK stayed away from a key meeting of the INDIA bloc parties on the same day a section of Trinamool MPs in Lok Sabha announced a split in the party. Whether the DMK, if it does, will formally join the NDA or provide “issue-based” support to the Modi government on key legislation matters is still uncertain.
A. Raja, the DMK MP from Nilgiris, did not respond to calls or texts from The Telegraph Online.
In Uttar Pradesh, which goes to polls early next year, the Congress and the SP have started making noises over seat-sharing, indicating a continuance of the alliance seen in the last Lok Sabha polls.
If the alliance stays on course, the bargain for seats between the two key INDIA components will continue for the coming months.
Congress Rajya Sabha MP Pawan Khera told The Telegraph Online that even before the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP was trying to secure numbers in Parliament to facilitate its plan to “reshape the constitutional and political character of India.”
At least 20 MPs of the Trinamool Congress in the Lok Sabha have switched to the obscure Nationalist Citizens Party of India (NCPI) and pledged support to the NDA, but the ruling alliance is still far short of the two-third majority mark of 362 needed to pass bills like delimitation that require constitutional amendments.
With the six defectors from the Shiv Sena (UBT), the NDA has crossed the 300-mark.
“One Nation, One Election requires constitutional amendments that the BJP does not presently have the numbers of pass, but it will benefit the BJP the most. Delimitation could significantly shift political power towards regions where the BJP is electorally dominant,” Khera said.
In the Rajya Sabha, with the resignation of three Trinamool MPs, these three seats from Bengal are most likely to fall in the BJP’s kitty whenever the polls happen. The NDA has crossed the 150 mark in the Upper House and is likely to secure the two-third majority, 164 seats, when the next round of election happens.
“This is not new,” Khera said about the defections storm and the BJP’s plan to push major bills..
“The BJP now appears determined to obtain them [MPs] through the backdoor – defections, inducements, horse-trading, political engineering and gerrymandering. Constitutional provisions governing Rajya Sabha elections, defections, the disqualification of defectors, party splits, the allocation of party symbols and other procedural matters are being twisted, ignored or selectively enforced whenever it benefits the BJP and its allies.”
Khera, one of the most outspoken critics of the Modi government, said such manoeuvers could work in favour of parliamentary arithmetic but remained an act of fraud on the mandate and would lack legitimacy.
“The project is brutally simple: first, change the numbers in Parliament. Then, change the rules of the Republic. This is not about electoral reform. It is an attempt to acquire, through political manipulation, the power to fundamentally alter India’s democratic and federal character for partisan gain. And that is precisely why it deserves to be resisted,” Khera said.
He did not respond on how the Congress planned to resist, having suffered defections in Maharashtra, Goa and Madhya Pradesh among other states.
Manoj Kumar Jha, Rajya Sabha MP from the RJD, told The Telegraph Online that the BJP appeared more desperate than the opposition parties that succumbed this month.
“Something more sinister than delimitation, more sinister than the passage of the bills that are core to the BJP’s agenda is being planned,” Jha said.
“I do not know what it is. Maybe it has something to do with the power transition within the BJP. This is a psychological game being played by the BJP. There will be no opposition in India and voices from the BJP’s eco-system will tell Indians – look, BJP is the only alternative.”