INDIA Bloc Unites to Stop the Modi Jaggaurnat

 

INDIA Bloc Unites to Stop the Modi Jaggaurnat

On June 8,2026, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), representing 25 opposition political parties, met at the Constitution Club, New Delhi. The meeting couldn’t have come at a worse time for the national Opposition, against the backdrop of country-wide concerns related to economic distress, inflation and the chaos in the educational sector.  It was the first meeting after the 2024 general election that reduced the strength of the BJP to 240 seats in the Lok Sabha, forcing Narendra Modi to head a coalition government, with the support of the NDA allies. The gains made in 2024 have all but evaporated, a large swath of the country coming under the BJP rule than ever before, mainstays of the Opposition coalition such as MK Stalin or Mamata Banerjee have been humbled at the hustings.

 

The meeting, among others, was attended by Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee, Tejaswi Yadav, John Brittas, and Supriya Sule, while Udhav Thackery and Hemant Soren participated online. Rahul Gandhi asked the parties to unite to fight against the BJP. He said that the Congress and INDIA bloc are on one side and on the other side are the BJP and the RSS who never took part in India’s freedom struggle. 

Contrary to the expectations, the INDIA bloc parties closed ranks around the Congress, realising that this was the way to save themselves from the onslaught of the BJP. There was a broad consensus among them that checkmating the BJP is essential for their political survival and to the health of Indian democracy and that the Congress remains the pivot of any credible national, secular and progressive formation. And with the three regional parties - Aam Aadmi Party, DMK and TMC - losing the Assembly elections in Delhi, Tamil Nandu and West Bengal, respectively, many regional leaders wanted the Congress to take the leadership position of the group.

J&K Chief Minister Omar Abduah, who attened the meeting, said: “The introspection has to be done collectively. We have actually achieved something big. Let’s not sit in this room looking gloomy.  Last time we sat there was no minority government. Now we have reduced Narendra Modi’s government to a minority government. Let us look ahead for 2029 and let us acknowledge that the Congress is the glue that holds India together.”

 

At the press briefing, after the meeting, the Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge announced the consensus reached by the parties on certain issues. They have unanimously adopted a five-point plan of action:  (1)To send a letter to the Chief Justice of India, flagging concerns over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), ‘vote-loot’ and stealing elections;(2)to demand immediate resignation of the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan because he presided over the betrayal of lakhs of youth who appeared for the NEET and the CBSE examinations; (3) the Union Government should immediately call an all-party meeting to discuss the precarious current economic situation, unemployment, price rise, famers issues, atrocities  and people’s centric issues;(4) all the parties to meet every two months, next meeting to be held in Hyderabad ; and (5) parliament coordination to continue during the monsoon session with daily morning meeting as usual in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition (Kharge).

 

There is an interesting article by KS Tomar – a senior political analysist and strategic affairs columnist – in The Free Press Journal, June 9. He summed up the predicament of the opposition parties in these words: “For nearly a decade, Indian opposition politics revolved around a paradox. Parties that were expected to collectively challenge the BJP ended up weakening one another. Regional leaders who rose as powerful anti-BJP figures gradually transformed into competing centres of ambition, each attempting to dominate the opposition space without surrendering political ground to the allies. The result was fractured and distrustful structure that repeatedly failed to convert ant-incumbency into a coherent national challenge.”

 

The best example of this are leaders such as Kejriwal, Mamata, Stalin, Akilesh, Tejaswi, Thackeray, and Pawar, whose ego and personal ambitions not only obstructed the emergence of a coherent national opposition to the BJP, but they got either decimated or weakened in the process. Even in the meeting on June 8, Akilesh Yadav told the Congress to show a ‘big heart’ and be ‘accommodative’ to have larger share of seats for themselves. This is how the regional parties have been pushing the national party - the Congress - to be a marginal player in elections, losing sight of the larger cause of fighting the communal and divisive BJP. The DMK never allowed the Congress to grow in Tamil Nadu, making it too dependent on the alliance to have a foothold in the state and survive. 

 

Tomar argues: “Ironically, the political weakening of some of these regional heavy weights may now open the possibility of rebuilding opposition unity on more stable foundations. The decline of leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Arvind Kejriwal after successive political setback may ultimately strengthen the INDIA bloc.  What once appeared to be the opposition’s biggest strength – the rise of assertive regional parties – increasingly became its greatest liability because many of these formations lacked both national reach and ideological consistency. Several regional parties expected the Congress to support them in their respective states while simultaneously attempting to erase Congress politically in those very regions. Personal ambitions further complicated matters. Multiple opposition leaders projected themselves as potential prime ministerial faces without possessing broader acceptability across India. In many states, regional parties successfully reduced the Congress strength but failed to emerge as viable national alternatives. This fragmentation ultimately benefited the BJP.”

 

The BJP exploited this weakness by engineering defection, attracting disgruntled leaders and expanding the cadre network within the opposition strongholds. Amid this churn, the Congress is discovering a political opportunity that seemed unimaginable a few years ago, with structural weaking of regional parties that had consumed its political space for decades. The regional parties and regional satraps growing at the expense of the Congress is a thing of the past. As regional parties lose domination, the Congress is emerging as the only opposition party with a genuine national foot-print, acceptable to all sections of society, and capable of ousting the BJP and Modi from power at the Centre. The weakening of regional satraps represents more than the decline of individual leaders. It signals the begging of a larger political realignment wherein the Congress reclaims the central space of national opposition politics.

 

This is evident from the way Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, is conducting politics these days. He has occupied practically the entire opposition space in national politics. He attacks relentlessly the BJP-RSS-Modi juggernaut. There is not an issue that he has not spoken about. The NSUI and IYC of the Congress are on the streets across the states protesting against the price rise, paper leak resulting in cancellation of the NEET and the technical glitches in the CBSE Board examinations that destroyed the dreams of millions of students, making their future bleak, causing them and their parents mental trauma. No other opposition party or opposition leader is seen taking to streets on these issues. Rahul Gandhi meets every segment of workers, interactants with the people and then raises their issues. 

 

It is difficult to understand Ramachandra Guha’s stand that the Gandhis are a liability for the Congress and that Rahul Gandhi is not fit to be a prime ministerial candidate because he is a ‘dynast'. A strange argument that shows refusal to reject the meaning of a hereditary ‘dynast’. Gandhis are not imposed on the nation through hereditary. They are the people’s choice. And without them the Congress will not survive. And without the Congress there will be no end to the Modi juggernaut. There is no other leader as Rahul Gandhi in recorded history of a democratic country who is persistently attacked, persecuted and humiliated, using the entire state machinery and the subdued media, and yet he survives to fightback single handed and remains a hope to dislodge the BJP and Modi from power. He is the only leader acceptable to all communities across the country. Guha refuses to acknowledge this reality.

 

The Nehru-Gandhi family’s history is a history of struggle, sacrifice and service for the nation. We will not find any such example in any other country. Guha is prejudiced against the Gandhi family. He doesn’t say who among other Congress leaders – Mallikarjun Kharge, KC Venugopal, Sashi Tharoor, P. Chidambaram, Ashok Gehlot, Sachin Plot and the like – is a more suitable prime ministerial candidate. Nor does he have any answer: who among the opposition leaders- Kehriwal, Mamata, Pawar, Stalin, Akilesh, Tejaswi - is qualified to be a Prime Ministerial face. He has no solution to the Modi’s authoritarian dictatorial regime that reduced the Indian democracy to an electoral autocracy either.

 

On June 9, at a press conference, the chairman of the All-India Congress Committee’s Research Department, Rajeev Gowda, released a 75-page ‘promise versus reality’ document to mark the second year of the third term of the Modi government. Some of the highlights of the document, reported in The Hindu, June 10, are very unsettling:

 

“Under Prime Minister Modi the rupee is the worst performing currency in Asia. Over the last 12 years, promises have been accompanied by big announcements, grand statements, and headiness. But the reality is that none of these headlines actually translate into anything that is meaningfully transforming the lives of the people. Four out of 10 graduates remain unemployed…only 7% of unemployed graduates had secured a permanent salaried job...India’s ranking in the Global Gender Gap Index had fallen from 108 to 131…MSME sector…nearly 40,000 enterprises had shut down in the previous financial year. Narendra Modi had claimed that India would become the world’s third largest economy and reach a 5 trillion-dollar economy by 2024. But the reality today is that economy has fallen below 4 trillion dollar and India has slipped to the sixth largest economy.”    

 

It is a positive step that the INDIA bloc unites to stop the Modi juggernaut.

 

 

PS:Rahul Gandhi’s speech at the meeting sets agenda for the Opposition. Excerpts: 

“I would like to welcome all of you here today. Thank you for coming.  Many years ago, I got into an argument with a very good friend of mine. I told him: what you are doing is completely unfair, his answer to me was: world is unfair, get used to it. It is not my place to answer any of the things said here about the Congress party today. It was my place to liken the Shiva tradition of swallowing everything. The idea of the blue-necked one Shiva who drinks all the poison. Whatever criticism you may have of me or the Congress Party, we will accept it, we will accept it happily with smile, we will try to make you happy because our role is fundamentally different from yours.  And I do not say this with arrogance. Our role, as many of you have stated, is to unite all of you together with love and affection. I have been an MP of the Congress Party since 2004 when I fought my first election. Our party is fundamentally differently organised than all other parties in India.  And I say this with humility. Why? Because this party began with a resistance movement when modern India did not exist.  Unlike all other parties, it was not built using the infrastructure and the protection of the India state. The Congress Party is a resistance movement protecting the idea that all Indians are equal.  We are fundamentally opposed to the vision of the RSS. We will die; we will die in the congress party before we stand compromised with the BJP or the RSS.  You will have to cut off our heads to make it happen. I knew lakhs and lakhs of congress workers in this country who will say cut off our heads we will not bow before the RSS.

 

I am sorry to say there is confusion in this group. The confusion is that you, the SP, the TMC, the RJD believe that the political instruments that you have used so far will still work. These only worked when the Indian state provided a fair field for them to operate. That field does not exist anymore. The BJP controls the instruments of the State. The BJP controls the legal system. The BJP controls the bureaucracy. It controls the intelligence agencies. It even controls the election commission. I have many friends in the TMC.  They were convinced that they were sweeping the elections in Bengal. I kept telling them you are in dreamland. I have seen what happens. I have seen it in Gujarat. I have seen it in Madya Pradesh. I have seen it in Chhattisgarh.  I have seen it in Haryana and Maharashtra.  And yet many of you are still not convinced.

 

The Congress party is a party of resistance. It does not require neutrality of the Indian state to operate and survive.  In fact, the more institutions of the state are throttled, the more they are captured, the more aggressively the Congress party will fight to defend the constitution of India. All of us share the ideals of the congress party. What are these ideals- Satya, Ahimsa, compassion, karuna.   What is the main issue over here. I have no interest in fighting you. I have to be a madman to suddenly get up and say I am going to fight you; you are our friends, you are our allies and you are the people we love. Please understand we won the last election in 2024. we did not lose the 2024 election. You asked why Nitishji left. It is not because of me. It is not because of the Congress party. And I will tell that in the near future even those few instruments that used to work will stop working because the BJP and the RSS are tightening their grip on the Indian state. The Congress party faced the same very decision more than 100 years ago. We were a political organization before 1927. The day Gandhiji said we want independence, we became a resistance movement. If political parties can’t function, then what can? Resistance functions. Resistance works. Wherever we resist, it works. I have seen with my own eye. I have walked 4000 kms across the country. Like it or not.  You don’t need the political architecture, you don’t need the bureaucracy, you don’t need the intelligence agencies. You need the act of resistance Meaning. I will resist; I will not allow injustice. Full stop. The end.

 

It is the spirit. It is not an organization. It is a way of thinking. Whether we like it or not, that is where we will have to go. The mindset has to change. The mindset must be we will not fight each other. We will not give the press a chance to attack us. We will resist.  You are thinking the challenge is winning the next election. The next election is already won. Please understand there is so much anger among the people of India the next election is already over. The problem is the capture of the instruments of the Indian state by the RSS. The problem is you will not have a free and fair election to win.   So we have to go into the mode of resistance. From my perspective, I am more than happy to absorb any criticism from any quarter because for me this is a religious duty, this is a spiritual duty This is no longer politics.  And that is why I promise you I will bear every single humiliation I have to bear to knit this group together and make it succeed.

 

Listen 100 % the elections are being stolen. The entire architecture, the media, social media, the legal system, the bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies- all of it is aligned to keep the government in power. But this government will not survive. It will not survive because it has destroyed our democracy; it has destroyed the future of Indian people. What is coming now after what has happened in Iran is uncontrollable, and it is going to create a space for us to mobilize the masses. It is easy to beat the BJP, if we stand together and resist. Everybody in this room should believe this. I guarantee you state after state, election after election whether they cheat or don’t cheat they will fall.”