Perennial Theatre

The INDIA bloc wants to govern India’s future but seems unable to escape its past. Its political imagination remains imprisoned in the UPA years, its leadership preoccupied with old alliances and its public interventions increasingly reduced to grievance and spectacle. The much-publicised meeting between Sonia Gandhi and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad Yadav in New Delhi was a reunion of an old establishment nostalgic for its lost eminence.

The two leaders reportedly spent their time reminiscing about the UPA years, recalling budgetary allocations for Bihar and invoking legislative legacies such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Given the apocalyptic years that the Lalu regime plunged Bihar into, it is hard to think of a worse political reunion.

The encounter was an appropriate sequel to the INDIA bloc’s theatrical show of strength at Ramlila Maidan where Opposition leaders, from Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav to Mamata Banerjee, converged on the capital for a ‘Chalo Dilli’ march demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged manipulation of electoral rolls.

The spectacle of leaders parading through central Delhi in an open bus was designed to convey unity and popular resolve. Rahul Gandhi threatened legal action and promised that the Prime Minister and the CEC would eventually face imprisonment.

The rally, meanwhile, exacted a rather more immediate penalty from ordinary citizens. Ahead of the rally, the Chamber of Trade and Industry (CTI) had repeatedly appealed to Sonia and Rahul Gandhi to postpone the demonstration until after the peak Diwali shopping season. The Opposition proceeded regardless. The result, according to the CTI, was an estimated business loss of Rs.11,000 crore in a single day, while nearly two million informal workers were deprived of their daily wages.

Rahul Gandhi’s subsequent attempt to blame the Centre, alleging that shops had been forcibly shut, was unconvincing damage control. An Opposition that claims to champion the economic interests of ordinary Indians might reasonably be expected to consider the livelihoods of traders, small businesses and daily-wage earners before staging a political demonstration. But this was not the case.

The alliance’s internal contradictions have been hardly less conspicuous. An Opposition bloc that struggles to accommodate its own ambitions can hardly expect voters to take its claims of national unity at face value.

The INDIA bloc has no convincing common programme of governance, no discernible economic philosophy and little evidence of a political imagination extending beyond the removal of the BJP. The Sonia-Lalu rendezvous offered a revealing glimpse of this intellectual stagnation. The INDIA bloc’s perennial weakness is that it remains bound less by a shared vision of India than by the collective survival instincts of its established leadership. It wants to take the country forward by looking resolutely backwards.