A Common Cause

In the nationwide CAA-NRC protests, the opposition parties may have found the glue that will hold them together in a grand alliance that can take on Narendra Modi’s BJP in the next big election battle.

- Ajit Kumar Jha

Barely eight months ago, a pall of gloom hung over the Opposition parties when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) swept the 2019 Lok Sabha election with 353 seats, including 303 for the BJP, its highest tally ever. Today, with new activism in the air, the opposition parties are a much more enthused lot. Two currents—one emanating from the east and other from the west—have gathered enough tailwinds to propel a grand coalition (mahagathbandhan) of opposition parties into a confrontation with the Narendra Modi-led central government.

The eastern current emerges from Assam where a flawed National Register of Citizens (NRC) effectively declared 1.9 million Indians “stateless”. In both Assam and Tripura, the resultant churn led to violent protests, suspension of internet and train services and deployment of army units. The anger spread like wildfire across the country as soon as the NDA government at the Centre rammed through the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019 in Parliament declared that a National Population Register (NPR) would follow soon.

The western current took shape late last year in Maharashtra, where a Shiv Sena­ NCP­-Congress alliance (the Maha Vikas Aghadi), pulled the rug from under the BJP’s feet. The swearing­in of the Uddhav Thackeray­led government on No­vember 28, 2019, was a game­changer for the opposition. The ‘invincible’ BJP had lost one of India’s largest states, and that too, ironically, by the Opposition splitting the NDA, a game which until now the saffron party had perfected. The very next month, in Jharkhand, a fierce anti­incumbency wave unseated the Raghu bar Das­led government. Twice in a row, BJP state governments lost power to an opposition coalition.