Bharat Bhushan | 2025: The Year When The Opposition Lost Its Mojo

The Opposition parties, which had seemed to be on the upswing after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, clearly lost their mojo in 2025. In an electorally disastrous year, it became fragmented and failed to project itself as a unified alternative to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The year began with the BJP scoring a decisive victory in the Delhi Assembly elections over the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in February, leveraging anti-incumbency, corruption allegations and unfulfilled promises of urban infrastructure improvements. The AAP, once seen as the enfant terrible of Indian politics, focused on national expansion, leaving Delhi’s political space open for the BJP.

The year ended with the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP registering a massive win in the Bihar elections in November, delivering a stunning psychological blow to the Opposition.

The Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), which presented a credible challenge to the BJP in 2024, lost coherence as its constituents lacked shared goals and splintered during elections.

The bloc’s ancillary regional alliances, the “Mahagathbandhan” in Bihar and the “Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi” (MVA) in Maharashtra, have come a cropper. In Bihar, Nitish Kumar, who everyone assumed was verging on senility, staged a stunning comeback as did the BJP with a 90 per cent strike rate, winning 90 of the 101 seats it had contested.

In Maharashtra, in the recent local body elections, the BJP-led Mahayuthi dominated over an Opposition lacking unity to win 207 out of 288 municipal council and Nagar Panchayat presidents’ posts. The MVA managed only 44 collectively, with its constituents often contesting against each other.

No single Opposition leader emerged as a national challenger to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who had shown the potential of rising to that role (he is still the boldest of them all), while remaining the face of the Opposition in Parliament, has failed to translate political leadership into electoral traction. Neither his “Vote Adhikar Yatra” in Bihar nor his bold statements criticising the Narendra Modi government seem to have resonated with the public.

The Congress’ failure in leading the Opposition alliance was partly because it was electorally irrelevant in key states, such as Delhi and Bihar. While Rahul Gandhi barely retained the symbolic face of the Opposition, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge fell short of projecting his party’s authority decisively in the INDIA bloc.

The party’s constantly shifting agenda -- from crony capitalism, unemployment and social justice through caste census to the charge of electoral manipulation (vote chori) -- has also contributed to its leadership being perceived as vacillating, inconsistent and unreliable. It appears as if with each new issue gaining traction in Rahul Gandhi’s mind, the old ones are relegated to the background. Now, Mr Gandhi’s speeches seem to have swung away from structural critiques of the government towards procedural grievances regarding the Election Commission. Once the substantive issues that impact people’s lives experientially are replaced by procedural grievances, the voters lose interest.

More importantly, the Congress’ campaign issues seem to be aimed at returning to the status quo ante -- restoring the pre-2014 institutional balance -- secular consensus, independent judiciary and a broadly neutral Election Commission. However, this backward-looking frame has no aspirational or transformative vision for India’s young voters. The party is defending old norms (and they do need to be defended), but without offering a vision for a new India that appeals to the youth, the marginalised and the minorities suffering the depredations of aggressive Hindutva.

Fixing procedures may restore the legitimacy of democratic institutions but it is unlikely to automatically translate into votes. It has to be accompanied by an attractive and inspirational vision for a new and socially just India with jobs, education, healthcare and representation.

The Opposition parties, more than ever, came to view the Congress this year as more a liability than a force-multiplier, eroding its centrality and credibility in the INDIA bloc. The INDIA bloc’s leadership crisis was also aggravated by the competing ambitions of strong personalities like Mamata Banerjee, Sharad Pawar, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, Arvind Kejriwal, Uddhav Thackeray and Rahul Gandhi. None of them wants to cede primacy to the other. Their ideologies -- from a caste-based world-view to Leftist and centrist positions -- also come in the way of sustaining long-term unity.

Nor do the non-Congress Opposition parties have a forward-looking plan for the nation. Besides signalling drift and disorganisation, the dismal message they send is that the INDIA bloc was nothing more than an opportunistic anti-BJP alliance with no proactive policy-driven agenda.

These problems have hobbled the Opposition in mounting a coherent challenge to the ruling BJP government at the Centre on structural and policy issues. With no plan of action or vision, the Opposition is unable to confront the government on the lack of jobs, growing income and wealth inequality, unequal access to quality education, and right to decent healthcare.

Instead of offering national policy alternatives, the Opposition ends up contesting elections on symbolic or tactical grounds where the public arena is already skewed in favour of the BJP, whose narrative control and organisational strength at the grassroots is overwhelming. Even when the Opposition thought it thought it had an issue to pin the government to the ground, it lacked resonance with the public.

In this state of affairs, the Opposition is staring at massive problems ahead. The state elections in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry will be critical for it to regain the political ground lost in 2025.

Except for Assam, the Opposition parties dominate these election-going states. These Legislative Assembly elections will test whether the national narrative of the BJP can be beaten by regional narratives -- Dravidian politics in Tamil Nadu; social welfare in Kerala; ethnic and tribal identity versus Hindutva in Assam; and in West Bengal framing the BJP as a culturally disruptive outsider versus the welfare schemes and charisma of chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

However, if disunity persists in the Opposition, the BJP could well expand further. This is a real possibility as in states like West Bengal and Kerala, the INDIA bloc allies will have no alternative but to contest against each other.

The writer is a senior journalist based in New Delhi