A Confederacy of Dunces

As Akhilesh Yadav taunts ‘ally’ Congress over the ED’s creation, the INDIA bloc looks more like a crumbling farce.

Uttar Pradesh

The only political force that seems capable of stopping the opposition INDIA bloc is the INDIA bloc itself. Forget Narendra Modi’s popularity and the BJP’s formidable election machinery, the opposition’s greatest enemy, as Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav so ably demonstrated this week, is its own monumental foolishness.

Landing in Bhubaneswar with all the gravitas of a man arriving at a wedding he was not invited to, Yadav decided that the urgent task before him was not to expose the government’s excesses or rally his allies, but to take a swing at the Congress party. “The Congress created the Enforcement Directorate (ED),” he declared smugly, “and now they are haunted by it.”

Here is a leader, supposedly part of a grand coalition to unseat the BJP, gleefully reminding voters that the Congress is corrupt, hypocritical, and deserving of its misfortunes. Opposition unity has been demonstrably skin-deep and even that is starting to peel.

The Congress, for its part, continues to behave as if public sympathy is an entitlement, not something to be earned. The Enforcement Directorate’s chargesheet against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, filed in the National Herald money-laundering case, accuses the Gandhis of conspiring to seize public assets worth upwards of Rs. 5,000 crores via a shady private firm in which they personally hold a controlling stake.

The irony is so rich one could bottle it and sell it as an elixir of cynicism. Congress, that ancient temple of corruption, is indeed being devoured by the very hounds it once unleashed. From the Bofors scandal, where kickbacks on arms deals toppled Rajiv Gandhi’s regime to the 2G spectrum scam that cost the exchequer Rs. 1.76 lakh crore; the Commonwealth Games scam that turned India into a global laughingstock; the coal block allocations that gifted away public resources like sweets at a village fair; the Adarsh Housing scam, where flats meant for war widows ended up with politicians’ nephews and mistresses — the list reads less like a political résumé and more like an indictment sheet of a criminal syndicate.

Yadav’s contribution to the Gandhi family’s latest mess was to suggest that the ED be abolished altogether. After all, why have a specialised agency investigating complex financial crimes when you could simply hand everything over to the income-tax department and hope for the best? The logic would be laughable if it were not so tragic. When Yadav argues against the existence of institutions that might expose corruption, he inadvertently confirms every cynic’s worst suspicion: that the real objection is not to the misuse of power, but to its use against the wrong people.

One might have imagined that, facing a dominant BJP, the INDIA bloc would understand the need for solidarity. But solidarity is difficult when every constituent party nurses decades-old grudges and believes its own rise can only come at the cost of its supposed allies. Not content with his broadside over the ED, Yadav also took credit for forcing the Congress to endorse caste-based census, as if scoring points off one’s coalition partners were a substitute for defeating the BJP.

The truth is that the INDIA bloc never had a coherent plan, a common ideology, or a plausible prime ministerial face. It was stitched together by fear and resentment, not any noble aspiration. And like all bad ideas born of desperation, it is falling apart at the first hint of pressure. The dark comedy between the Congress and the AAP, which unravelled in the Delhi Assembly election and continues in Punjab, is the best proof of his grand ‘alliance.’

India’s voters are not fools. They can see that the opposition’s fine words about democracy, justice and federalism are little more than fig leaves for ambition and incompetence. They can see that the alternative to Modi is a bickering assortment of petty chieftains, each more concerned with his own fiefdom than with the national good.

The BJP’s slogan for the future might well be borrowed from the opposition’s own playbook: why change captains when the other team is busy drowning itself?