Terms of Trade: Can the Opposition reinvent itself?

IT is utile to start this pillar by highlighting a commonness betwixt the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) chief ministers in Assam, Bihar and West Bengal. Combined, these states have almost as many Lok Sabha seats as the Congress has today. Himanta Biswa Sarma was a senior leader of the Congress party in Assam before he joined the BJP. Suvendu Adhikari was a Trinamool Congress leader in West Bengal and his father was a Congress-man before he joined TMC and then the BJP. Samrat Chaudhury and his father started and succeeded in politics in the Mandal parties. All of these defections to the BJP happened after 2014, once the party proved its national dominance and did enough to suggest that it could win these states.These facts are not just coincidence. They capture a political reality in India. A large number of capable regional leaders are now willing to join the BJP and provide it the last mile advantage in winning their states. The biggest casualty in this churn is the fate of proverbial secularism – politics against the BJP – in Indian polity. In hindsight, one can say that secularism was only useful for these politicians as long as it helped them gain power.Let us look at a counter-example. In Kerala, the Congress has finally decided in favour of the in-house organiser V D Satheesan rather than the wannabe paratrooper from high command, K C Venugopal. What perhaps helped the former’s cause was his success in rallying the minority vote behind the Congress in one state where they actually had a clear choice of voting for a non-BJP non-Congress alternative, namely, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M). To be sure, the CPI(M)’s own approach helped the Congress’s cause. In some ways, the 2026 contest in Kerala reversed the 2021 polemics, when the Congress rabidly attacked the CPI (M) over the Sabarimala temple entry—read soft Hindutva—issue from a reactionary majority plank. This time it was the CPI(M) which was accusing the Congress of supporting minority communalism.A similar story, albeit at a much smaller scale has played out in other states too. In places such as Bihar and West Bengal, Muslims, in parts where they were confident of getting their own elected, defected from supporting the primary secular party in the contest for other non-BJP options. The moral of the story is clear. Muslims have had it with being taken for granted without political agency. Question is, can an anti-BJP party retain its Hindu support while organically representing Muslims rather than being cagey about their support?Let us turn to the economic part of politics now. Every political party in the country is now operating on cash transfers to win elections. Everything else, including cracking the challenge of boosting manufacturing, does not seem to matter for electoral outcomes. This has been the running refrain among many commentators on the Tamil Nadu results which saw a loss for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.Also Read:Terms of Trade: And then there were noneCash transfers give the incumbent an initial advantage. But the latest election cycle shows they are not immune to challengers for good. An ascendant BJP in West Bengal, a political newcomer in Tamil Nadu or the conventional challenger in Kerala triumphed against economic populism this time. The winning parties have promised not to discontinue these benefits. So, the electorate did not really mind a change of guard.The religious divergence between Hindus and Muslims and economic convergence in doling out survivalist benefits represent a fundamental triumph of democracy in the limited sense of the majority prevailing in an electoral contest. Is socially majoritarian and economically palliative politics the ultimate destiny of India? After all, it is far from optimal.The most fascinating thing about politics, however, is that the majority can be persuaded to change its views. Doing this requires reimagining politics. It has to be a politics invested in breaking the status quo rather than seeking to make limited exploits from it. This is exactly what India’s opposition needs to do today.In the realm of the social, it would take convincing the Hindu majority that vilifying the Muslim majority to the extent of being illegal infiltrators or via other ploys is just an act of schadenfreude. This must be an organic process rather than a liberal rant about institutional apocalypse that makes little effort to evolve a cross-community dialogue at the grass root level. While it may seem unpalatable to some people, typical secular politics since the 1990s has not helped contain the political ghettoization of Muslims in large parts of the country. In many parts this has also encouraged unscrupulous elements within Muslims, which has only reinforced communal stereotypes.In the realm of the economic, the opposition must focus on breaking the consensus on the palliative route to peace in our political economy. It must go looking for issues where the fault lines are wider than paltry cash transfers can fulfil.This is a politics which will require being at the barricades when things precipitate rather than throwing crumbs at them to keep people from hitting the barricades. How many opposition parties have a handle on the unrest within India’s manufacturing workforce which has shown intermittent explosions in the last few months? What are they doing to build an organic leadership from this young, angry and always precarious underclass?To be sure, the approach cannot be mindless antagonism. It must focus on the structural infirmities in the larger Indian economic situation. How much of an honest conversation has India’s political establishment had over these issues? Does it really have a theory of what has happened in the last 35 years since India embraced economic reforms? What do words such as anti-neoliberalism or Nehruvian socialism mean in actual practice for the opposition’s economic approach?Also Read: Terms of Trade: The 2026 battle for West Bengal, seen historicallyDo existing party structures, which are wedded to control and access to political finance, even allow for such ideological learning, unlearning and churning? To be sure, political finance enjoys dominance not just in the opposition, but also the BJP. But the latter is enjoying the best alignment of contradictions for its politics. On the religious question, India is firmly tilted towards Hindutva dominating politics. On the social (within the Hindus) question, the BJP is representative enough to pre-empt an old-school social justice challenge. Dogmatists who still think of the BJP as an upper-caste party might disagree but the facts show this clearly. My colleague Nishant Ranjan has built historical caste databases of chief ministers, deputy chief ministers, and the council of ministers over the years. On the economic question, the BJP is enjoying the TINA tailwinds from both capital and the underclass. And its overall dominance allows the BJP to promote ideological foot soldiers rather than opportunist local money bags within its ranks. Money flows top down rather than bottoms-up in the party’s coffers.Most of the questions raised here are not easy to answer even theoretically, let alone in terms of developing effective political praxis around them. Pivoting towards working on and exploiting these contradictions will require some amount of creative destruction in the existing political capital of the opposition. The inertia can be immense for political actors wedded to their own future, not the future of their politics.Is this a reason why the opposition is happy to pull out the excuse of the BJP’s dominance arising from institutional capture ? While there is some substance to this theory, it also means that the opposition is still invested in restoring the status quo ante rather than breaking it. This should not been seen as personal criticism of the current generation of opposition leaders, but rather a critique of their political philosophy. They are being defeated, after all, by a political philosophy which has held its core worldview vis-a-vis religion, but evolved over the last hundred years to align itself better with class and caste. Anybody who hopes that this can be challenged by just arithmetic has either a shallow or a dishonest take on Indian politics today.(Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa)