On December 3, as news of the Congress rout in the assembly elections in the three heartland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh started drifting in, party president Mallikarjun Kharge called for a meeting of the partners of INDIA, or the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, on December 6. The coalition of 28 Opposition parties was formed in June this year for the grand project of fighting the BJP collectively in the summer of 2024. This meeting was supposed to resume the stalled process of brainstorming and perhaps initiate discussions on a key pending issue: seat-sharing. Instead, the call for the meeting exposed the growing fault lines within the bloc, as allies challenged the central role the Congress has been trying to assert.
That there was little coordination among the allies was evident soon enough: less than 24 hours before the meeting was to take place, it was deferred to the third week of December. Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her counterparts in Bihar and Jharkhand, Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) leader Nitish Kumar and Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) chief Hemant Soren, respectively, excused themselves, citing previous engagements. DMK (Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) supremo and Tamil Nadu CM M.K. Stalin was busy with a different sort of turbulence: the devastation wrought by Cyclone Michaung. Mamata even publicly claimed that she was not consulted before the meeting was scheduled.
With their collective thumbs-down, the allies were seeking to convey a message to the Congress—that they would no longer tolerate any unilateral decision-making by the Grand Old Party. More so after its disastrous performance in the assembly polls, withparty trounced the incumbent Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) as the only saving grace. Earlier, the Congress had taken flak from the allies over not just the seat-sharing squabbles but also for stalling the alliance’s momentum because of its preoccupation with the assembly polls. The tables had turned and now the others had little patience for it.
