Hollow Unity

For a country that styles itself the world’s largest democracy, India certainly needs a robust Opposition. In theory, the coming together of parties in the INDIA bloc should be cause for optimism. A chorus of dissent if disciplined, credible and rooted in evidence, can check the excesses of any government. But the noisy march to the Election Commission (EC) office in Delhi was no such moment of principled defiance. It was a performance staged for the cameras and propelled less by democratic conviction than by political opportunism.

In its first major street protest since the 2024 general election, the motley coalition of Congress, Samajwadi Party, Trinamool Congress, the Left and others rallied against the EC’s ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR) of Bihar’s electoral rolls, as well as alleged “vote chori” in the Lok Sabha polls. Some 300 placard-waving MPs in colour-coded party caps marched to NirvachanSadan, clambering over police barricades and shouted slogans before being detained in theatrical fashion before being released two hours later.

It was an arresting spectacle. But what lay beneath the noise was depressingly hollow. Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, treated the episode as a veritable ‘coronation moment’ in proclaiming that this was a “fight for the Constitution” and “one man, one vote.” Without verifiable evidence, such slogans ring as tinny as a cracked cymbal.

The EC has already dismissed Gandhi’s allegations as baseless and misleading. Far from engaging with the charges in good faith, the Opposition leaders have sidestepped the Commission’s request to file formal complaints with documentary proof under oath. Officials from Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana even wrote to Gandhi personally, inviting him to submit evidence. The invitation remains unanswered.

This is not the conduct of a movement genuinely invested in reforming India’s electoral machinery. It is the choreography of an Opposition that has been listless for months, suddenly discovering that street theatre can mask the absence of a credible legislative or policy alternative. By framing the protest as a moral crusade, Gandhi also sought to elbow out other contenders for leadership within the rickety INDIA bloc while banking on images of hand-holding solidarity to restore the Congress’s waning primacy.

Unity in the Opposition is, in principle, a public good. But unity forged in opportunism, and directed at phantom grievances, corrodes democratic discourse rather than strengthening it. The more the bloc resorts to noisy but evidence-free allegations, the more it invites the government to dismiss legitimate concerns in future as mere political posturing.

Such antics may briefly dominate television coverage, but they do little to inspire confidence in the Opposition’s capacity to govern should it ever return to power. That it was the INDIA bloc’s first real show of unity only underlines how little binds its members beyond the shared hope of dislodging the BJP. The Opposition’s tragedy is not that it lacks causes worth fighting for but that it repeatedly squanders its energy on causes that collapse under scrutiny.