The recent public debate on Rahul Gandhi’s capabilities as an effective challenger invites us to re-examine the form and the substance of contemporary Indian politics. This debate opens up a possibility to find out the internal configuration of India’s political class and the nature of political competitiveness.
Rahul Gandhi has made serious efforts to engage with common people through a positive and inclusive agenda, especially during the Bharat Jodo Yatra. The Congress’s performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections cannot be underestimated either. However, the inability of the Congress Party — and, for that matter, of Rahul Gandhi — to sustain and nurture the gains from these crucial initiatives is an important political phenomenon. The electoral success of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the post-2024 period demonstrates the inherent weaknesses and the shortcomings of the Opposition. One might, therefore, ask a very basic question: what is the nature of political opposition in India?
This question is analytically useful. The political players, both the ruling BJP-led National Democratic Alliance as well as the Opposition, agree on a few unwritten norms of politics. These ‘new rules of the game’ are followed not merely to decide the limits of electoral competitiveness but also to redefine the multifaceted relationship between the citizens and the political class. In other words, one may find a broad political consensus on certain fundamental issues.
As an idea, political consensus may sound quite bizarre under the present circumstances. The political divide between the NDA and the already fragmented INDIA bloc is self-evident. Although the Opposition has failed to develop a political framework capable of articulating a clear, anti-BJP position, the scope of its criticisms has expanded enormously in recent months. The BJP, on the other hand, does not wish to be seen merely as a defender, especially after ruling the country for more than a decade. The party has retained its professional approach, particularly in the realm of electoral politics. These apparently conflicting tendencies create a strong impression that there is no scope for any form of consensus in the sphere of actual politics.
A clarification is necessary at this point. Political consensus must be distinguished from three common misconceptions.
First, consensus does not mean that the entire political class will begin to act in a uniform, homogeneous, and ideologically undifferentiated manner. Ideological differences, competing interests, and contestation remain integral to politics in a democratic set-up.
Second, political consensus should not be understood merely as a conflict management technique. On the contrary, it represents an agreement to sustain disagreement within a mutually-accepted and politically-viable framework. Consensus, in this sense, establishes the boundaries within which political conflict can be legitimately expressed and negotiated.
Third, political consensus is not synonymous with elite collusion or a conspiracy among political actors. It should not be reduced to allegations of secret deals, back-room negotiations, or corrupt arrangements (although the destructive effects of corruption on public institutions and political processes in India cannot be underestimated).
In my view, a political consensus is a tacit, unwritten, and implied arrangement that is deliberately worked out by competing political actors and groups to facilitate the smooth functioning of the State in a democratic set-up.
This line of argument is not entirely new. Serious observers of Indian politics like Rajni Kothari and the Rudolfs tried to make sense of the ever-fluctuating nature of Indian politics after Independence. Kothari’s famous ‘Congress-system thesis’ of the 1970s* was based on the idea that the Indian political class, despite being highly divided along ideological lines, succeeded in evolving a kind of mechanism — a consensus — to run the system. This is exactly what we can also observe now.
There are two identifiable features of the emerging political consensus. First, there is an agreement on the expected role of the State. The recent assembly elections clearly demonstrates that all political parties have uncritically accepted the charitable State model — a pro-market State that provides selective benefits to citizens on a case-by-case basis as the most viable form of welfarism. Political parties seem to agree that a one-time benefit to the most deprived sections of society, the labharthis, is a useful electoral strategy. A comparative analysis of the manifestoes of the BJP and the All India Trinamool Congress for the 2026 West Bengal assembly election would underline this fact. Despite taking different, mutually hostile, and competing political positions on cultural identity, both parties proposed almost identical sets of welfare schemes to reach out to the voters.
The second feature of the present form of political consensus is the acceptance of nationalism as the dominant narrative. The electoral success of the BJP in the post-2014 period has played a significant role in legitimising nationalism as a template of politics. The secularism/communalism binary of the 1990s has ceased to be a politically viable tool for electoral mobilisation. While it is true that the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Samajwadi Party in the northern states and the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu, including the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, do rely heavily on different versions of social justice, they are forced to acknowledge nationalism as the defining framework. The Congress resolution, ‘Nyay Path’, is a good example of this. This document defines the Congress’s version of nationalism as positive, inclusive and real, while denouncing the “pseudo-nationalism of the BJP-RSS”. The party emphasises its commitment to secularism, the empowerment of micro, small, and medium enterprises and rights-based policy framework as expressions of its inclusive nationalism.
These two features of political consensus also mark an interesting contradiction. The Opposition, particularly the Congress, is keen to capitalise on the growing social and political anxieties; however, it cannot transcend the established contours of the prevailing consensus. This structural logic of politics, in a way, determines the nature of political transactions in contemporary India.
Hilal Ahmed is a political scientist