Why it's increasingly a challenge for Congress to keep INDIA Bloc glued

As regional parties within the INDIA Bloc continue to assert themselves and blame the group’s largest constituent, the Congress party, for failing to rein in a reinvigorated BJP, fresh faultlines that have emerged within the Opposition camp in the New Year are expected to widen further.

A cross-section of leaders from the Bloc, including those from the Congress, The Federal spoke to believe that the friction isn’t limited to the BJP’s surprise victories in the Haryana and Maharashtra polls during the latter half of 2024 or the intensifying disharmony between the Congress and the AAP in the ongoing campaign for the Delhi Assembly polls.

While the BJP’s quick electoral revival following the setbacks of the Lok Sabha polls is a “major concern,” a bigger problem for the Opposition group is that “it (INDIA Bloc) now seems to exist only in our imagination”, sources in the alliance said.

Key allies sing a different tune

Over the past fortnight, leaders of various INDIA Bloc parties have spoken out publicly on various issues within the alliance. The Trinamool Congress had made no secret of its ambition of seeing Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee being made the “face of the Bloc”; knocking the Congress off its presumptive pole position within the alliance. Bloc constituents Trinamool, Samajwadi Party and Shiv Sena (UBT) have all decided to endorse the AAP in the Delhi polls in which the Congress is also desperately trying to position itself as a serious player.

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Discordant notes have also been struck by J&K Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who has repeatedly questioned the Bloc’s political future in the absence of any coordination meetings of the alliance since the Lok Sabha poll results last June. The Congress’s decision to extend outside support to Abdullah’s government despite having contested the election in a pre-poll alliance and the fast-gaining impression in Srinagar that the CM is being “extremely indulgent” towards the BJP to ensure smooth sailing for his government has also contributed to frayed relations between the allies, sources said.

Smaller allies too back out?

Even much smaller constituents of the Bloc, such as Hanuman Beniwal’s Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP) and Rajkumar Roat’s Bharat Adivasi Party (BAP), have variously said while they continue to “fight the BJP”, their presence in the INDIA Bloc was “only for the Lok Sabha polls” and that “no talks have been held on their role in the alliance since the Lok Sabha results”.

Beniwal, whose party announced its support for the AAP in the Delhi polls over the weekend, made it clear to The Federal that he had severed ties with the Congress “as soon as they betrayed us and decided to field a candidate from Khinwsar” and asserted that “there is no INDIA alliance now”. Beniwal’s wife, Kanika Beniwal, had narrowly lost the Khinwsar assembly bypoll to the BJP’s Rewat Ram Danga, last November and the RLP chief has, since, blamed the Congress, which finished a distant third in the seat, for the defeat.

Why is AAP upset in Dehi?

The Congress’s decision to not just contest all 70 seats in the upcoming Delhi elections but also field “strong” candidates against top AAP leaders, including Arvind Kejriwal, Chief Minister Atishi, and Manish Sisodia, has evidently irked the AAP. Leaders from the AAP and some other INDIA Bloc constituents The Federal spoke to said the Congress “knows it can’t win any seats given its poor organisational base but can damage the AAP’s prospects in several constituencies by splitting the secular vote” and that such a split “will only benefit the BJP, which is what the INDIA Bloc was supposed to prevent”.

If BJP wins Delhi...

What is troubling leaders of the INDIA Bloc more, however, isn’t just the possibility, even remote, of a BJP victory in Delhi but the gnawing impression that while the saffron party has been “quick to recoup and bounce back” after the Lok Sabha polls, the Opposition group is “moving towards disintegration”.

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A possible reason for such worry in the INDIA camp is that a victory or even marked improvement in the poll fortunes of the BJP in Delhi, soon after the triumphs of Maharashtra and Haryana, would allow Prime Minister Narendra Modi to truly and fully shake off the humiliation of the Lok Sabha results that saw the saffron party’s tally plummet to a minority of 240 seats for the first time since 2014.

“The BJP hasn’t won Delhi since 1998. Even when Modi’s popularity was at its peak in 2014 and 2019 and the BJP swept all seven Lok Sabha seats of Delhi; it couldn’t win the Delhi Assembly election. If the BJP wins now, when it was supposed to be weakening as seen in the Lok Sabha results.... you can well imagine how the result will be projected by Modi and his coterie. Everything the INDIA Bloc worked towards six months ago will be destroyed,” a senior CPM leader said.

Other worries too

While prospects of the BJP being on the ascendant, benefitting at least in part due to the AAP-Congress acrimony, and its likely implications on the INDIA Bloc aren’t to be dismissed lightly, there are also issues beyond the Delhi polls that have the Opposition group worried.

At the Belgaum Session of the Congress party on December 26, the Congress Working Committee had resolved to dedicate 2025 to “sanghathan srijan” or organisational strengthening. Under normal circumstances, if the Congress achieved this ambitious task that it had grossly failed at over the past few decades, this would be good news for the Opposition in its combined fight against the BJP. But then, these aren’t normal circumstances as the INDIA Bloc owes much of its electoral heft and gravitas to powerful regional players, most of which have grown at the cost of the Congress.

Tricky alliances with regional parties

If the Congress truly seeks to reinvigorate itself, on its radar would be expansion plans in states where it has been pushed to the fringe by the very regional players it is now in alliance with. In the recent past, the Congress attempted to do so by striking alliances with regional players – RJD in Bihar, JMM in Jharkhand, SP in Uttar Pradesh, DMK in Tamil Nadu, the Left or the Trinamool in Bengal, the NCP in Maharashtra, NC in J&K and so on. When it failed to deliver electorally, as it did in Bihar in 2020, it pulled the entire alliance down with it.

A reason cited, albeit off the record, these days by parties such as the SP or even the RJD to back AAP over the Congress in Delhi or Mamata as the INDIA Bloc’s face, is to keep the Congress’s spiralling ambitions of securing a bigger pie of seats from allies during state assembly polls under check. Bihar, for instance, goes to polls later this year and the RJD, sources say, is in no mood to grant the Congress the same chunk of seats – 70 out of 243, it won just 19 seats – it got five years ago.

2027 UP elections on radar

Likewise, the Congress is hoping that its alliance with the SP, which almost singularly was responsible for the BJP’s Lok Sabha tally slipping to 240 seats in last June, would continue for the UP assembly polls scheduled in early 2027.The SP, which was unwilling to spare as many seats as the Congress wanted out of the 10 assembly segments that went for bypolls last November (the Congress eventually decided to sit out the entire bypoll contest), is determined not to entertain “unrealistic” demands of its senior partner, the playful camaraderie between Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav, notwithstanding, SP leaders said.

Congress leaders, expectedly, say the regional parties are trying to take “undue advantage” of the Congress leadership’s “commitment to the INDIA Bloc”. “On the one hand, they blame us for not doing enough to defeat the BJP and on the other hand, they don’t want us to strengthen ourselves and remain tethered to them. Parties like the RJD want the Congress to remain weak so that they can remain the dominant player in the state,” former Bihar Congress chief Madan Mohan Jha, who has been campaigning for Congress candidates in Delhi for the last few days, told The Federal.

'Cong should be careful'

Jha adds, “The RJD or other parties of the INDIA Bloc should not be under any wrong impression that only the Congress benefits from an alliance with them; in many areas there is still a Congress vote and any party we ally with benefits from this vote whereas in a state like Bihar, the Congress often loses out because of its association with the RJD as people who still remember the bad days of Lalu Prasad’s governance don’t vote for us because they think if our alliance comes to power, those bad times will also return... it is high time the Congress leadership realised that though alliances may be necessary for keeping the BJP out, they should not be done at the cost of the Congress’s growth.”

Echoing Jha’s views, former Delhi Congress chief and party candidate from Delhi’s Patparganj assembly seat, Anil Chaudhary tells The Federal, “I want to ask parties like Trinamool and SP which have supported AAP over us in Delhi; there are many states where AAP has no presence but it contests the election and splits our vote... we have seen in Haryana, Goa, Gujarat and other places also how AAP cut into our votes and directly helped the BJP to win; so in such states why don’t Mamata didi or Akhilesh ji announce their support for Congress.”

Challenging days ahead for Congress

The challenge for the Congress, as it embarks on its sanghathan srijan this year, and the wider INDIA Bloc is how it would navigate these contradictions and clashes among them to continue posing a real electoral and ideological fight to the BJP.

A senior Congress leader said, “No solution can come if we keep working at cross purposes and undermining one another... the senior leadership of the INDIA Bloc needs to urgently sit together and discuss the future of the alliance; there is merit in the complaint of some of our allies that the alliance, since the Lok Sabha results, has not come together to spell out its roadmap for the future; this has to be done as a priority... we may still have disagreements at the state level but nationally, we need to come together, address any difference of opinion and then move forward unitedly or else all the gains we made six months ago would be razed to the ground.”