Indian opposition needs broad-based platform

In a letter to top leasers of 10 national and regional parties, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee last week made a fervent plea to join hands to save India’s democracy.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the government at the Centre, wants to reduce state governments to the level of municipalities, she said.

It wants to establish one-party authoritarian rule, and the time has come for a “united and effective struggle against the BJP’s attacks on democracy and the Constitution”, she added. She went on to stress the need to present a credible alternative to the BJP before the people of India.

Calls for opposition unity have been a feature of national politics since the days when the Congress party dominated the scene. After the BJP replaced the Congress as the largest national party unity calls are understandably directed against it.

Normally, unity calls come on the eve of parliamentary elections and are part of attempts to maximise electoral gains.   

Mamata Banerjee’s call has come in a different context. The BJP is in a comfortable position in the Lok Sabha and parliamentary elections are not due for another three years. Yet there is an electoral context to her epistle too.

She wrote it in the thick of a violent Assembly election campaign. She is making a bid for a third successive term as Chief Minister. The BJP is trying hard to dislodge her.

There have been several clashes between supporters of BJP and her Trinamool Congress (TMC), leading to casualties on both sides. She herself was injured in a clash and has been campaigning since then seated in a wheel chair.

The immediate provocation for her letter is the BJP’s no-holds-barred campaign against her. But she is clearly looking ahead to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Mamata Banerjee’s letter lists several acts of the Modi administration which have adversely affected the interests of state governments.

These include scrapping of the Planning Commission and the National Development Council, and misuse of the office of the Governor and the Central investigative agencies.

Abolition of the Planning Commission and the NDC were among Narendra Modi’s first acts on becoming the Prime Minister in 2014. They extinguished the role economists and state leaders had in the process of planned development.

Surprisingly, no party raised any serious objections to it until now.

Several Governors appointed by Modi came to office with no experience except as office-bearers of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, fountainhead of the BJP’s Hindutva ideology.  They have been giving pinpricks to Chief Ministers, and Mamata Banerjee has been one of the worst sufferers in this regard.

The use of Central investigative agencies against political opponents, too, was an early Modi innovation. The first to be targeted was former Congress minister P. Chidambaram.

Investigators who have looked into his family’s finances for seven years do not seem to have found sufficient material so far to prosecute him. Ahead of the current round of Assembly elections, Central agencies began probes into the businesses of relatives of leaders of parties ranged against the BJP in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Whether or not the probes result in prosecution and conviction, they may have served an immediate political purpose by raising a cloud of suspicion.

In the letter, Mamata Banerjee has cited the enactment of a law enhancing the powers of Delhi’s Lieutenant Governor to illustrate how the Centre is creating problems for elected governments.

In holding up a minor Delhi law as an example, ignoring major enactments which are in gross violation of constitutional principles, she has unwittingly caused damage to her own cause.

If the objective is to bring the opposition together in a struggle against the BJP’s attacks on democracy and the Constitution, she needs to take note of the Citizenship Act amendment as also the enactments that reduced the state of Jammu and Kashmir to a Union Territory.

The three laws presented as measures to reform the farm sector, too, have abridged the powers of state governments. All these measures provoked strong public protests from the affected sections.

The farmers’ protests are still continuing in Delhi and elsewhere. The anti-CAA protesters pulled out as the coronavirus pandemic struck but are sure to return to the streets if the government starts giving effect to the law.

The Opposition needs to build a broad-based platform to pose an effective challenge to the BJP in 2024.

Secular and democratic forces must shed the illusion that they can take on the BJP without confronting the Hindutva ideology.  They have to make common cause with all those who have been fighting the BJP’s undemocratic and unpopular laws.