I.N.D.I.A | Halting the BJP juggernaut

The year couldn’t have begun any worse for the coalition better known by its backronym, INDIA, than the somewhat clunky ‘Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance’. It was just six months before that it was born, named and heralded as the Opposition’s best shot at challenging the decade-long dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). And yet here was one of its paternal spirits and most visible faces, Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, defecting to the very camp he had been plotting to defeat! Nitish’s pirouette to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA), which sent shockwaves through the political landscape, was widely interpreted as a rejection of the Congress’s keenness to capture centrality and control. For a coalition that had positioned itself as the panacea for precisely such tendencies in the BJP, this raised uncomfortable questions about the alliance’s coherence and durability—a theme that echoed throughout the year.