The final takeaway of the 2024 General Elections is that the largest political party in the country, the Bharatiya Janata Party has got 240 seats, 32 short of the absolute majority.
The principal opposition party, the Congress has got 99 seats, 173 short of the midway mark. Still, the Congress is claiming it to be its “victory” and the “defeat” of the BJP, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in particular.
So much so, that Congress has not ruled out the option to explore the possibility of forming the government after the consultation with its alliance partners. This is even though the pre-poll BJP-led National Democratic Alliance has already got 295 seats, more than 23 needed to form the government.
When questioned during the post-result press conference on Tuesday, both the Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and former president Rahul Gandhi tried to evade the question and passed the mic to each other.
Finally, it fell on Rahul who said that the Congress would be talking about it with its alliance partners. He did not say that the mandate was for the Congress and the INDIA bloc was for sitting in the opposition.
Kharge initially said that the Congress party accepted the verdict of the people with all humility. The verdict is clear that the Congress-led Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) has not won the elections. The alliance has in reality lost the election to the NDA.
Just because the BJP has fallen short of the majority of its own does not mean that the NDA should be prevented from forming the government.
It is so strange and surprising that some of the Indian leaders have started trying to approach, rather than poach on, the Janata Dal-United leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister-elect N Chandrababu Naidu, both of whom had already pre-poll-alliance-with the BJP.
Leaders of both parties have already made it categorically clear that they will be going with the NDA only.
Moreover, what extra will the JD-U and TDP get from deserting the NDA and joining INDIA? They will, in any case, get the ministerial berths in the NDA government and INDIA can offer them nothing special or nothing extra.
By exploring the options of seeking allies from the NDA, Congress has only shown desperate opportunism that it wants to get power by hook or by crook.
The Congress should gracefully accept the verdict that it still has not been chosen by the people to rule the country, neither of its own nor with the alliance partners.
The 2024 verdict may be a fractured one, and may not have thrown a clear single-party winner, but it has certainly given the mandate to the NDA which is already past the midway mark of 272 having got 295 seats (according to the available trends till filing of this report).
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