Vandita Mishra writes: As the military dust settles

Indian Express

5 days ago

Dear Express Reader,
Over a month after the terror strike in Pahalgam, and a little over two weeks after the India-Pakistan ceasefire, politics is still slowed down. The imperative of projecting unity against an enemy that can target holidaymakers in a Valley meadow and make a whole nation grieve, has had a flattening effect on adversarial politics. But as the military dust settles, a stark landscape is being bared. It features a government enhancing its brimming arsenal, a struggling Opposition facing a sharpening challenge, and few softening or leavening forces.
Before terror struck, the Congress-led Opposition had returned to the backfoot because of the BJP's successive assembly election victories in Maharashtra, Haryana, Delhi. After making a dent in the BJP's tally on the 2024 Lok Sabha scoreboard, constituents of the INDIA bloc suddenly seemed to show no will to live together again, or at least, going by the resentments expressed by smaller allies openly, not under Congress leadership. There was a brief moment when these parties set aside their differences, to break through their hesitations and ambivalences on a question that involves the Muslim minority — that was in Parliament, on the waqf bill. But the moment remained a blip.
Now, going ahead, the Opposition's challenge will be to confront a BJP that is trying to wrest from it the 'social justice' plank after announcing the caste census, when, at the same time, the flaring of India-Pak hostilities is set to further shrink the Opposition's space at home, or at least make it much more difficult for it to move and manoeuvre.
On the matter of the caste census, the BJP has made Congress's bad predicament worse. While Rahul Gandhi made the demand for a caste census most insistently in the last couple of years, he faced a credibility issue even while he was making it. As a party, on the ground, Congress has been much slower to Mandalise itself than the BJP — in state after state, you can count more backward caste leaders in the BJP. While it can be said that the BJP's OBC leaders, like other BJP leaders, have decreasing clout in a party that has centralised all power in the time of Narendra Modi, Congress lags behind even on a token representation test.
Across states, a Congress under a walled-off high command has seemed frozen in comparison to its main opponent that, with RSS help, seems to be constantly moving and spreading — Congress has not seen the rise of an identifiable set of new grassroots leaders in decades. In Madhya Pradesh, for instance, where Congress has just launched what it calls its most extensive organisational restructuring exercise in decades, which aims to introduce a new tier of committees at panchayat and ward level, it also needs to ask itself this: Why is it that, over the years, it has not managed to produce OBC leaders to match Uma Bharti, Babulal Gaur, Shivraj Chouhan of the BJP?
MP is a state where no single OBC caste is numerically dominant, like the Yadavs in Bihar and UP, which could form the nucleus around which a challenge to upper caste dominance could coalesce. And yet, when an election comes in MP, the BJP at least lines up its individual OBC leaders behind Modi, while Congress fights for the OBC vote on terms set by the BJP — by flaunting a me-too Hindutva, showcased by its leaders' hectic temple-hopping, or by trying to outbid the BJP on its cash transfer schemes. Rahul Gandhi's demand for a caste census has remained unsupported by a larger agenda or programme of social justice that his party owns or participates in.
On India-Pakistan and Operation Sindoor, Congress faces another difficult problem — it needs to find the language in which it can frame the questions that need to be asked of the government, starting with what went wrong in the Modi-led Centre's story of a terror-mukt, post-Article 370 Naya Kashmir. It will need to find the words that can hold the government accountable, while side-stepping its attempts to trap and corner it.
Indications are that the Modi government will not hesitate to leverage the military Operation within the country. Even before Pahalgam, 'pro-Pakistan' and 'anti-national' were being used as labels to taint and subdue political opponents. Now, the arrest of Ashoka University professor, Ali Khan Mahmudabad for online posts — Supreme Court has given him a grudging interim bail since — has sent out a chilling message. It speaks of a disturbing ease-of-criminalisation of criticism and free speech.
The government warns against 'politicisation' of Operation Sindoor, even as the ruling party organises and participates in Tiranga yatras across states. In any case, for all its exhortations that 'national security' is above partisan politics, and the two should never meet, the BJP has unabashedly used one for the other — after Balakot, 'Pakistan ko ghar mein ghus ke maara (we entered Pakistan and hit it)' has become a staple of the election campaign of the BJP. It draws into the domestic point-scoring, air-brushed and context-free photo-ops and freeze-frames of foreign and security policy.
By including Opposition leaders in all-party delegations to foreign capitals after Operation Sindoor, the BJP has done two things simultaneously. To the world, it has projected a united front, and domestically, it has magnified the difficulties for the Opposition party — now it must join hands with the government, while it is still figuring out the best way of opposing it.
The row over the government's selection of Opposition leaders, inviting accusations from Congress and TMC that it had not consulted the party — TMC managed to replace the government's nominee with its own while Congress had no such luck, with only one of its list of four making it to the final delegations — underlined the fact that government and Opposition don't talk to each other, there is little to-and-fro, a near absence of civility.
This depleted landscape was not created by Pahalgam. But Pahalgam becomes a sombre milestone in it.
Till next week,
Vandita