INDIA bloc still without coordination panel three years on
New Delhi, Sep 14 (PTI) Three years ago, members of the Opposition huddled at Sharad Pawar's Delhi residence with clear objectives: decide seat-sharing, coordinate campaigns, and turn the INDIA bloc into an electoral force.
The first meeting of the bloc's 14-member coordination committee, then envisaged as its highest decision-making body, took place on September 13, 2023. That was to be the committee's last meeting.
Three years on, the committee has vanished. Two of its original members are now in the BJP's camp. This year there was an effort to restore coordination at the national level.
On June 8, opposition leaders held their first major formal meeting in more than two years. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge announced that the parties would now meet every two months.
A meeting in Hyderabad in August was suggested but never occurred.
"We are waiting for the Congress to pick a date for the meeting. There is no word from them on why the Hyderabad meeting did not materialise," a senior opposition leader told PTI.
When asked, a senior Congress leader said he had no information.
Meanwhile, there has been a churn in the relationships between the parties that formed the grouping, presenting the Opposition with difficulties ahead of assembly elections next year in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Goa and Manipur -- states where the parties are allies in certain places, rivals in others, and potential partners in others.
The AAP, which exited the bloc last year, is locked in an increasingly bitter battle with the Congress in Punjab. On Sunday, it allied with the Goa Forward Party to offer a non-BJP, non-Congress alternative in Goa. The party has plans to go solo in Gujarat.
Even where the state-wise approach has worked electorally, strains have emerged.
The JMM-Congress-RJD alliance comfortably retained power in Jharkhand in 2024, while the National Conference and Congress fought the Jammu and Kashmir polls together and emerged on the winning side.
Congress leaders in Jharkhand have frequently complained about representation in the government and coordination with the JMM. The party's relationship with the NC in Jammu and Kashmir has deteriorated more visibly over power-sharing.
The differences spilt out into the open again this month when the Congress objected to the rendition of the full version of Vande Mataram at a government-backed event, while the NC hit back at its ally.
In Tamil Nadu, the Congress-DMK partnership, one of the INDIA bloc's most durable state alliances and a major contributor to its 2024 Lok Sabha performance, broke down ahead of the 2026 assembly election, when the Congress left the DMK-led front and joined the ruling TVK-led alliance.
To understand how the bloc arrived here, it is worth going back to 2023.
At its September 2023 Mumbai meeting, the bloc's 13 members were appointed to a 14-member coordination committee, reserving one spot for the CPI(M), which chose not to name a representative.
The 13 were K C Venugopal from the Congress, Sharad Pawar from the then undivided NCP, T R Baalu from the DMK, Hemant Soren from the JMM, Sanjay Raut from the Shiv Sena (UBT), Tejashwi Yadav from the RJD, Abhishek Banerjee from the Trinamool Congress, Raghav Chadha from the AAP, who has since joined the BJP, Javed Ali Khan from the Samajwadi Party, Lalan Singh from the JD(U), which returned to the BJP-led NDA in 2024, D Raja from the CPI, Omar Abdullah from the National Conference, and Mehbooba Mufti from the PDP.
When they first met, the leaders agreed that discussions on sharing of seats in states should start right away and wind up as soon as possible.
They also announced that INDIA would hold its first public rally in Bhopal the following month.
The rally idea was dropped within a few days, discussions over seat allocation continued for several months, and the committee never met again.
An opposition leader told PTI that the proposal to have a central committee to steer the group was "not viable" because of pre-existing contradictions among the partners. He stated that the flexible arrangement allowed partners to adopt formulas according to local circumstances.
The state-wise approach paid dividends in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, with INDIA parties winning 234 seats. The SP-Congress combine took 43 of Uttar Pradesh's 80 seats, the opposition alliance 30 of 48 in Maharashtra, and the DMK-led front swept Tamil Nadu. But the bloc fared poorly in Bihar, Jharkhand, Gujarat and Delhi, while its constituents fought separately in West Bengal and Punjab.
The results in the assembly elections that followed were more uneven.
The opposition suffered a crushing reversal in Maharashtra months after its impressive Lok Sabha performance there.
Congress and AAP failed to agree on an alliance in Haryana, where the BJP returned to power, and fought separately in Delhi in 2025, where the BJP ousted AAP and Congress again drew a blank.
The Opposition lost Bihar and Assam, while in Kerala and West Bengal its constituents fought on opposing sides.
In Uttar Pradesh, both the Samajwadi Party and the Congress have said that their alliance will extend to the assembly elections. However, negotiating the 403 assembly constituencies will likely be a much tougher task than dividing up the 80 Lok Sabha seats.
The alliance has occasionally shown that it can still combine on common national issues -- the joint letter sent to the Chief Justice of India regarding the SIR -- and work together in Parliament, such as uniting to defeat the delimitation-linked Constitution Amendment Bill.
But in the absence of a forum that can intervene when disagreements arise between allies, the grouping has often been left without a resolution mechanism. Three years after its coordination committee met for the first and only time, the next electoral cycle will once again put that approach to the test.
