New Delhi: India’s opposition parties decided Friday to jointly contest the 2024 national elections to prevent the Bharatiya Janata Party from achieving a third straight win.
The 26 opposition parties decided to work out seat-sharing arrangements in different states in “a collaborative spirit of give-and-take” to avoid splitting votes in favour of the BJP.
India’s national elections are scheduled to be held around May next year.
Congress party leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi joined other key opposition leaders, including Sharad Pawar, Arvind Kejriwal, Sitaram Yechury and Lalu Yadav, at a two-day meeting in Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital.
Their goal would be to set up a direct fight by putting one contestant against a BJP candidate in each voting district.
The opposition parties formed the alliance in June, named the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance. Called INDIA for short, it is challenging PM Narendra Modi’s party on its economic record, rising unemployment and a host of other domestic problems.
Mallikarjun Kharge, the Congress party president, said that at stake is the future of India’s multiparty democracy and secular foundations that have seen assaults from the government.
“Modi’s government is slowly taking the country toward a dictatorship,” Kharge told reporters after the meeting.
Sambit Patra a BJP spokesman, slammed the opposition parties’ meeting and said their alliance was only for pretending unity and they will end up fighting badly with each other during the 2024 elections.
Lalu Yadav, a former Bihar state chief minister, complained that the opposition leaders have been the targets of raids and investigations by federal agencies controlled by the government.
The BJP denies its involvement in the cases.
However, analysts say the opposition’s effort to oust Modi is a difficult task. He is by far India’s most popular leader, and his party directly controls 10 of the 28 states, is in coalition in four other states, and has more than 55% of Parliament’s lower house 543 seats.
Modi became India’s prime minister in 2014 and won a second term for his party in 2019 with an easy victory against a splintered opposition.
