It is not easy being an Opposition leader in India these days. It’s like living with one’s head in the lion’s mouth. If Opposition leaders strongly defend their political turf, they find the Enforcement Directorate at their doorstep, they’re arrested and forced to resign like former Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren. Or face relentless ED summons, like Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal does. If an opposition party is dominant in a state, like the Trinamool Congress in Bengal, it could be denied access to central funds. If the Opposition rules through a rickety coalition, it is vulnerable to ‘Operation Lotus’ and is in perpetual danger of being destabilised, like in Bihar and Maharashtra, or lose an election even when they have a majority, like in the Chandigarh mayoral poll.
Democracies are about voters’ choice, and elected governments are temporary. Those in power today could be out of power tomorrow. Only 37% voted for BJP in 2019, 63% did not. The Opposition upholds the rights
of citizens who did not vote for
the government.
In parliamentary democracies, the Opposition has a formal and recognised position. It has a set of established rights to challenge the government and offer itself as the alternative. Along with the government, the Opposition reflects the entire voice of the people. In a democracy, it is the people (and not any government) who are the sovereign or rulers. Therefore, the Opposition, which gives voice to those who did not vote for the government, is a fundamentally important player in the ruling arrangement. A recent report showed that Rs 500 crore of taxpayers’ money for a Mumbai city upgrade went to only ruling Shiv Sena-BJP MLAs. In effect, citizens who did not vote for them have been entirely ignored.
Today, in the world’s largest ‘democracy’, the Opposition is not only being persecuted, it is being delegitimised. The Modi-led BJP is forgetting that 20% of Indian voters voted for the Congress party. TMC and other parties also got vote shares, however small. Yet, the Opposition is being ‘gheraoed’ in parliament and squeezed out of the media. Why do these elected representatives not matter? A whopping 146 Opposition MPs were suspended during the winter session of parliament. MPs raising questions have been disqualified, such as Rahul Gandhi in 2023 and TMC MP Mahua Moitra last December. The Opposition is denied space in the mainstream media, where the government and its discourse have taken over prime time.
Of course, there are a certain type of Opposition leaders who are largely left alone by the Modi-led BJP. These are those who have made peace with the BJP government, such as Naveen Patnaik in Odisha or Jagan Mohan Reddy in Andhra Pradesh. For them, state politics necessitates that they remain on the same side as the BJP. Rahul Gandhi is a curious case. While the BJP wants to silence him in parliament, yet it seems unthreatened by his yatras, convinced that Rahul is the BJP’s “perfect enemy,” who allows the saffron party to unleash the naamdaar vs kamdaar slogan. BJP has trounced the Rahul-led Congress in two consecutive general elections and believes, as BJP’s Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma recently tweeted, “We need Rahul for elections.”
So, is India then entering a highly dangerous situation of an Opposition-mukt Bharat and a single party, single leader ‘democracy’? Is India now a spookily stalled republic?
Our neighbours provide chilling examples of the subcontinental gene of authoritarianism. Last month, Bangladesh held elections with Sheikh Hasina controlling State power and winning an eerie “victory” where there was no political contest, with the Opposition mostly jailed.
In Pakistan, former PM Imran Khan has been deposed and thrown in prison. Is India heading in this direction? The draconian PMLA allows the government to jail Opposition leaders for extended periods, with courts seemingly reluctant to intervene. Delhi’s Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia has been in jail for a year now even though a money trail to link him to the alleged liquor scam has not been established. In democracies like the US, pushbacks to government power can come from institutions like the courts and the media. But in a fragile democracy like India, there are almost no institutional restraints on overweening executive power.
Comparisons are repeatedly drawn between an Opposition-stifling Congress in the 60s and 70s and the present Modi regime. Yet, Jawaharlal Nehru nurtured an Opposition, brought in his ideological opponent Syama Prasad Mukherjee into his cabinet, and allowed full rein for Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s anti-Congress oratory in parliament. The anti-Nehru Opposition was able to build itself up toward the 1967 elections (in which Swatantra Party won 44 and Jana Sangh won 35 seats), only to falter when the personality cult of Indira Gandhi began to sweep through India. Yet, even in the Indira years in the 1970s, Opposition leaders were able to mobilise support. The image of the then socialist firebrand George Fernandes in handcuffs caused a public outcry. In his famous 1975 Ram Lila Grounds speech, Jayaprakash Narayan even called for the police and the army to mutiny. The public rallied to the Opposition cause.
Today, a canny RSS-BJP has painted all Opposition as somehow illegitimate and enemies of the people by dubbing them as members of various ‘anti-national gangs’. The 2011 Anna Hazare movement has reinforced a ‘sab neta chor hain’ mentality among citizens so that today the plight of opposition politicians is met with citizens’ apathy and indifference. There seems to be little public concern on what happens to Soren or Kejriwal or Mamata.
Perhaps the political diversity of India will save us from single party dictatorship, and regional parties in the states will keep alive democratic competition. But there may well come a time when they too will succumb to exhaustion and demoralisation in the face of sustained attacks. The death of the Opposition spells doom for Indian democracy. Those who did not vote for a government are citizens with just as many civic rights as those who did. Their voices and representatives must not be silenced.
(The writer is a senior journalist and commentator based in Delhi)