NEW DELHI: Almost all Lok Sabha MPs would like to serve a full term rather than face the expense and uncertainty of a fresh election. Such a factor has apparently not been taken on board by advisers, such as Sam Pitroda, who are close to Rahul Gandhi.
Every politician and the party they belong to claim on almost a daily basis that all their actions are guided by the public interest. If that were indeed the case, efforts at causing hurdles to the functioning of the Central government are clearly not in the public interest.
The more stormy the seas on which the Ship of State is travelling, the calmer the vessel itself needs to be, including both the ruling parties as well as the opposition. Given the configuration of seats bequeathed by voters in India in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, only a coalition centred around the BJP with its 240 seats can form a stable government. Were the BJP to be in opposition and a cluster of other parties form the government, such a coalition would lack a centre of gravity, something that the largest party within the coalition and its leader need to provide. Something that the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi are providing, something only they can provide. As a consequence of India being a democracy, the Congress Party doubled its seat tally, reaching a hundred after an elected MP formerly of the Congress Party but expelled after being refused a ticket in the polls and fighting as a rebel, joined the party. In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi realised that with only 197 Lok Sabha seats, he could not come back to office as Prime Minister despite the Congress seat tally being far more than that of the Janata Dal led by V.P. Singh (143). The reason was that he would not be acceptable to enough parties for getting support from them. Remembering his mother’s return to office in 1980 after being defeated in the 1977 polls, Rajiv decided to sit in the opposition. V.P. Singh became the Prime Minister of a fragile coalition which fell apart soon afterwards, ushering in a period of instability.
Such political flux ended only in 1999, when the NDA under Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee won a majority in the Lok Sabha. In 2004, the NDA lost to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, where Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi chose Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister. Under him, the UPA won in 2009 as well. Manmohan Singh, who had earned the confidence of Sonia Gandhi by his unswerving loyalty, continued as Prime Minister until NDA Prime Ministerial nominee Narendra Modi secured a majority for the BJP in 2014, a feat he repeated in 2019. Had any other leader than Modi been the NDA nominee as PM, the BJP would have secured less than 150 Lok Sabha seats in the 2024 polls. The effort by a constellation of forces working to deny PM Modi a third term was to keep the BJP tally below 220, an objective publicly revealed by Rahul Gandhi days before the counting of votes, when he said the BJP would get less than 220. This was the number of LS seats those in the “Anyone but Modi” (ABM) movement calculated would prevent if not the BJP at least PM Modi, from getting a fresh term. It was once again the Modi factor on voters which resulted in the BJP getting 240 seats, enough to form the nucleus of a stable coalition together with the Telugu Desam and the Janata Dal (United).
240 was enough to ensure that Modi returned as PM to head once more a coalition government, but a stable coalition, something not possible under any other leader or party in the present Lok Sabha. Given that a mid-term poll may result in a shock for the Congress Party, few MPs in that party are on board with what seems the clear intent of Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi to generate enough fireworks to dislodge the NDA government led by PM Modi and replace it with a rickety coalition which would last only a short time, resulting in a mid-term poll in which voters would decide which party they prefer to form a government. What they would seek would be an outcome where the ruling party has a majority, which means they would plump for the BJP (240) rather than the Congress (99).
Almost all Lok Sabha MPs would like to serve a full term rather than face the expense and uncertainty of a fresh election. Such a factor has apparently not been taken on board by advisers such as Sam Pitroda who are close to Rahul Gandhi. PM Modi is wisely giving a long rope to the Opposition, including by not seeking to break up such coalitions as was the case in the past, or bringing down governments as happened in the past. Even the Trinamool Congress has been left to stew in its own increasingly toxic juice rather than seek martyrdom by having Central rule imposed on Bengal, as is being demanded by so many in that state and outside after the RG Kar hospital atrocity. In this, the actual murderers and rapists have yet to be located by the state police, leave alone arrested. Every day that passes, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee as a consequence loses more and more of her appeal, something visible across Bengal.
More and more voters who stayed away or voted against the BJP as a consequence of grievances real and imagined are regretting their decision, and seeing the way PM Modi has seamlessly evolved from the leader of a single party government to the leader of a coalition, they are increasingly gravitating towards Modi. They wanted change in the 2024 polls, and PM Modi has shown that he understands their message and is himself, through his third term policies and actions, becoming the change which such voters wanted. Rahul Gandhi needs to be careful of getting what he wishes for, a collapse of the NDA government and soon afterwards, a fresh poll. If such a desire were to come true, it would do so in a way completely at odds with what he seeks through it, which is to emerge as PM himself of a new government.