The nation is exactly a year away from the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and the BJP looks all set with victory in the Northeast. On the other hand, there is confusion in the opposition camp with each party forming a different alliance at different points of time.
At this time of the year in 2024, the election commission will probably declare the dates for the general elections. With barely a year at hand, people would expect the opposition to come on the same page and finalize their PM candidate and the strategies on how they will fight the elections.
But this is not the case the opposition does not look united, last week when the Aam Aadmi Party and Bharatiya Rashtra Samithi joined hands with the Congress in protest against the misuse of Central agencies and in demand of a JPC committee on the Adani issue, the Trinamool Congress and the Nationalist Congress party remained away from the protest. Earlier, TMC and NCP would be with Congress, and not the AAP and the BRS.
Meetings between Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee, KCR, and Kejriwal keeping the Congress away shows the cracks in the opposition. Last month, when ED arrested Deputy Chief Minister of Delhi Manish Sisodia, all the parties protested against the move but the Congress stayed away and sadly it protested in Delhi for the resignation of Manish Sisodia.
Can the opposition restrict BJP below 250?
The situation of the opposition looks nothing different from 2018, a year before the 2019 general elections. The only difference is that Congress is trying to win back its lost ground by doing the Bharat Jodo Yatra but it seems the yatra is already fading away from the minds of people. Political experts believe to keep the BJP away from power, its tally must be restricted below 250 and this might bring interesting offers to the likes of Mamata Banerjee, KCR, Naveen Patnaik, and Nitish Kumar.
The opposition tried the same thing in 2019 but the ruling party’s tally increased compared to 2014. From 282 in 2014 it reached 303 in 2019, if we look at the big states of the Hindi heartland and add Karnataka and the Northeast the BJP has 320 seats with them from these states. This time the opposition leaders look convinced that these numbers will come down by 20-25% which will bring the BJP’s tally below 250 in the general elections. The opposition thinks the major reason for this is the BJP losing major allies like Uddhav Thackrey in Maharashtra and Nitish Kumar in Bihar.
The opposition seems to forget the fact that before 2014 JDU got split from NDA and fought the election alone which restricted them to two seats only. The BJP then joined hands with Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party ( LJP) and Upendra Khuswaha’s Rashtriya Lok Samata Party and managed to bag 31 out of the 40 seats. As Nitish again moved away from the BJP, and with his decreasing popularity the BJP is again all set to join hands with its old allies once again in 2024.
An alliance between the Samajwadi party, the Bahujan Samaj party, and the Congress managed to bring BJP’s seats to 64 in 2019 from 73 in 2014. This time as each party will fight alone, the BJP is expected to sweep the state again and Yogi Aditynath’s rising popularity will also work in BJP’s favour.
Essentially, the opposition’s hope lies in the voter’s minds and what they think about Modi and his government after two successive terms. As of today, there is no indication from the ground that Modi voters are doing a re-think on their choice. The opposition should try to create an environment that the BJP created before the 2014 elections. They must bring such a face before the voters that made them believe that this particular person can change the destiny of this country.