Mamata to KCR, Opposition parties are seeking a united stand against BJP

But the Congress' position is unclear

The call, when it came, was ironically not from the Opposition leadership but the top echelons of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). At a function hosted by a Marathi language newspaper in Pune last week, Union Minister and senior BJP leader Nitin Gadkari said a strong Opposition was a sine qua non for democracy. “Atal Bihari Vajpayee lost the Lok Sabha election (in the late 1950s) but still earned (then Congress PM) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s respect. Hence, in a democracy, the Opposition’s role is very important. I wish, with all my heart, that the Congress remains strong. Those in the Congress today must stick to their convictions and remain in the Congress. They must continue to work and not despair because of defeat,” he said, making it clear that he, at least, did not agree with the belief that the BJP would be deemed to have been successful in its mission only when India was ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ and that the BJP’s doors must be perpetually open to accept defectors from the Congress.

This would have been a brave stance for a BJP leader to take, given that both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah have flagged a Congress-free India as one of their primary ambitions. But Gadkari was voicing a different concern. He said a weakened Congress meant the rise of regional parties, which was not a good development in Indian politics.

So what is the nature of the party-based opposition in India going to be? Will the Congress bow in the face of overwhelming electoral defeat and agree to yield space to regional parties, in a move that is pure political jujitsu. In doing so, it would be using the weight of the BJP’s proposition — that to be a true nation, India must have one ration card, one identity, one national language, one set of elections, one idea of India, etc — and overthrowing it with its own weight.

There is potential in this but there is no indication this is happening.

For the whole of the Winter Session of Parliament in 2021, MPs from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) mounted an agitation inside the two Houses against the Centre’s refusal to buy parboiled rice from their state.

The kernel of the problem is this: In November 2021, the Food Corporation of India (FCI) made it clear to Telangana farmers that it had no use for parboiled rice and would not be buying it. Following this, Chief Minister and TRS chief K Chandrasekhara Rao counselled farmers not to sow any more paddy. But there are more than 1,000 mills to thresh parboiled rice in Karimnagar and Nalgonda districts alone. If no one buys rice from them, these will become NPAs —most of them are operating on machinery for which they have taken out bank loans. Thousands of labourers are engaged in the production of parboiled rice.

Not just in Telangana. In Odisha, West Bengal and Bihar, too, parboiled rice is the grain of choice. In fact, in Bengal, 90 per cent of the 15.5 million tonne (MT) of rice consumed in the state is parboiled rice. The Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MP P Acharya said in the Lok Sabha in December last year that this year’s surplus parboiled rice in Odisha — the amount left over after meeting the requirements of the state’s own welfare schemes — amounted to about 2.8 MT.

“Through the FCI, we were supplying our surplus quantity of rice. Unfortunately, adding to the problems of farmers of Odisha, Telangana and other states, this time, the central government has given a directive that not a single grain of parboiled rice will be procured from our state,” Acharya said during Zero Hour. Union Minister Piyush Goyal’s defence was diplomatic but telling. He told the House: “The situation is that we can provide such rice which is eaten by people in other states.” 

“We cannot force any particular type of rice on people. The rice that is consumed in other states can be procured by the FCI (Food Corporation of India),” he added.

Last week, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi took up the refrain but he opted to plough a lonely furrow. He attacked both Telangana government and Centre for throwing paddy farmers to the wolves. What had the potential of becoming a salt satyagraha-kind of issue (and could have been used to counter the “Vocal for Local” slogan coined by the PM) ran aground into small-time bickering.

Former Union Minister and Congress leader Manishankar Aiyar explains what the problem with the Congress is: “Where the Congress sought, and still seeks to be, a party of everyone, many in our electorate believe it has therefore become a party of no one. The fractionating of the Indian polity has left the Congress picking up the leftovers.”

Instead, he says, the Congress leadership must go back to 2004 — and what it did right. “What Sonia Gandhi achieved in 2004 was: She led her ‘party of inclusion’ into a ‘coalition of inclusion’ — the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), a rainbow coalition comprising most of the votaries of special interest politics. It so successfully ran the UPA-I that the voters rewarded the alliance with a second successive victory in 2009 that carried the Congress from about 140 seats in 2004 to a new high of 206 in 2009”.

The latest initiative has been taken by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. In a letter to Opposition leaders, flagging concerns about the undermining of federalism, she wrote: “I urge everyone to come together for a meeting to deliberate on the way forward at a place as per everyone’s convenience and suitability. Let us commit to the cause of a unified and principled Opposition that will make way for the Government that our country deserves”. She’s waiting for a Congress response.