Sisodia’s arrest has profound national implications for the direction the Opposition will eventually pursue. After tarring the TMC and AAP with the corruption taint, it is inconceivable that the Congress could include the Opposition in its anti-corruption blitzkrieg. That’s expecting too much. The core of its 2024 blueprint has only one strategy, and that is to position Rahul as Modi’s sole adversary.

“Refusing to reconcile with the reality that its pre-eminence as the Grand Old Party might be dated by now, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge qualified his imploration to the Opposition with the caveat that the exercise would follow the UPA template with the Congress heading the coalition because it was the only party that had never done business with the BJP. It’s a fact few would dispute, but should the Congress grandstand at every opportunity on its ‘unsullied’ ideological ‘credentials’? Can parties such as the SP be labelled as BJP’s accomplices even as the subject of whether their campaigns against Hindutva were sufficiently robust should be debated? Has the Congress scored over other non-BJP entities on this marker? If the Congress’s pro-secular, pro-minority credentials were impeccable, why did Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor intervene at the AICC plenary to emphasize that his party could have been ‘more vocal’ on the release of Bilkis Bano’s rapists in Gujarat, the attacks on churches, lynchings in the name of cow vigilantism and the bulldozing of Muslim homes.”

The ruling BJP could be sanguine in the belief that the country’s attention has been deflected from the Hindenburg-Adani row by the arrest of Delhi minister and Aam Aadmi Party’s backbone Manish Sisodia.

The development has profound national implications for the direction the Opposition will eventually pursue. The early indications augur well for the BJP because the arrest has reopened the fault lines running through the Congress and the regional parties, some of which it is counting on as its allies in the prelude to the 2024 General Election.

Delhi offers only seven parliamentary states. It is a quasi-state that is partially governed by the Centre, which has increasingly shrunk the space for the exercise of powers by the Arvind Kejriwal government after the BJP lost the 2015 and 2020 Assembly polls to the AAP.

Delhi is significant for the BJP because the seeds of the downfall of the Congress-helmed United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government were sown in the national capital in a long-drawn-out protest against the UPA’s ‘corruption’ and ‘misrule’; Kejriwal was then closely associated with the anti-corruption movement piloted by Anna Hazare. The India Against Corruption stir became a launch pad for Kejriwal’s political career, which was carefully camouflaged by his ‘activism’ with a moral underpinning. The Congress was the principal casualty of the protests and the BJP the eventual gainer.

The arrest of Sisodia, a founding member of the AAP, provoked strong reactions from regional forces, but invited the Congress’s endorsement. KT Rama Rao, working president of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), accused the BJP of “resorting to stealth politics by inciting Central agencies against Opposition parties in states where it can’t come to power (on its own).” For the BJP, BRS-ruled Telangana is analogous to Delhi. The party’s exertions have not fructified into tangible political gains. At best, the BJP can hope to unseat the Congress as the main Opposition party in Telangana, unless the ground situation dramatically changes. Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav lauded Sisodia’s record in making quality education accessible to Delhi’s underprivileged children and remarked, “The BJP proved that it is not only against education, but also against the future of Delhi’s children.”

The approval by the Congress’s Delhi unit stood out all the more against the backdrop of the party’s call for forging ‘Opposition unity’ before the next Lok Sabha battle at its just-concluded plenary in Raipur. Refusing to reconcile with the reality that its pre-eminence as the Grand Old Party might be dated by now, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge qualified his imploration to the Opposition with the caveat that the exercise would follow the UPA template with the Congress heading the coalition because it was the only party that had never done business with the BJP. It’s a fact few would dispute, but should the Congress grandstand at every opportunity on its ‘unsullied’ ideological ‘credentials’? Can parties such as the SP be labelled as BJP’s accomplices even as the subject of whether their campaigns against Hindutva were sufficiently robust should be debated? Has the Congress scored over other non-BJP entities on this marker? If the Congress’s pro-secular, pro-minority credentials were impeccable, why did Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor intervene at the AICC plenary to emphasize that his party could have been ‘more vocal’ on the release of Bilkis Bano’s rapists in Gujarat, the attacks on churches, lynchings in the name of cow vigilantism and the bulldozing of Muslim homes? “If we don’t speak out in such cases, we are only surrendering our core responsibility of standing up for India’s diversity and pluralism, which should be central to the Congress’s core message,” Tharoor had stated.

More evidence followed to demonstrate that the Congress was unwilling to cede the leadership position to a leader from a prospective ally. Addressing a meeting in Shillong, Rahul Gandhi aggressively engaged with the Trinamool Congress (which fought the Meghalaya elections solo) and listed the violence in West Bengal, the Saradha scam and the alleged profligacy exhibited by the TMC in the Goa elections as proof of its ‘tradition’ and its propensity to ‘help’ the BJP and defeat the Congress. Meghalaya’s last Congress Chief Minister Mukul Sangma had crossed over to the TMC with a dozen legislators. At the same time, at a rally in Nagaland, Kharge made it amply clear that the Congress would lead the Opposition alliance that will come to power at the Centre in 2024. “The Congress will lead. We are talking with other parties. Because otherwise, democracy and the Constitution will go,” claimed the Congress president.

Secularism apart, it is apparent that the Congress has acquired a sense of proprietorship over the public articulation and projection of corruption, exemplified in the Centre’s alleged patronage to Adani and its silence on the questions raised by Rahul in Parliament. In his speech at the Raipur session, Rahul compared the Adani conglomerate with the East India Company and said, “History is being repeated.” “The Independence struggle was against the East India Company. That was also a company, the company that took away India’s wealth, infrastructure, ports….” he stressed.

After tarring the TMC and AAP with the corruption taint, it is inconceivable that the Congress could include the Opposition in its anti-corruption blitzkrieg. That’s expecting too much. The core of its 2024 blueprint has only one strategy, and that is to position Rahul as Narendra Modi’s sole adversary.

(The author is a senior journalist)