New Delhi: Bye-elections on Thursday to five assembly seats in Kerala, Gujarat, West Bengal and Punjab will further test the cohesion of the flailing INDIA bloc, with the opposition allies pitted against each other in the contests.
On the surface, it’s a familiar story of elections exposing cracks within the Opposition bloc—something that has played out far too many times before. However, it also serves as a reminder that, one year after the Lok Sabha elections, the allies continue to drift farther and farther apart.
Sample this: In the run up to the polls, the CPI(M) and the Congress have called each other “communal” in Kerala; the AAP has accused the Congress of being “treacherous” in Gujarat; the Trinamool Congress is facing allegations of a “nexus” with the BJP from the Congress-Left combine in West Bengal.
During the upcoming Monsoon Session of Parliament, these parties will attempt a united front to corner the BJP on a range of issues. After all—MPs of 16 Opposition parties, including the Congress, the CPI(M), the TMC—wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month demanding a special session of the Parliament on Operation Sindoor and the Pahalgam terror attack.
But elections lay bare the limitations of such cooperation in the Opposition ranks, often on display during Parliament sessions.
The Congress is contesting all five seats going to polls on 19 June—Kadi and Visavadar in Gujarat, Nilambur in Kerala, Ludhiana West in Punjab, and Kaliganj in West Bengal. In Visavadar and Ludhiana West, the Congress candidates are pitted against the AAP, while in Nilambur, the party faces the CPI(M).
In Kaliganj, the TMC candidate is up against a joint Congress-Left nominee. Kadi is the only seat where the contest is directly between the Congress and the BJP. Although the AAP has also fielded a candidate in Kadi, its presence there is marginal, with the Congress and BJP being traditional rivals.
The Kadi seat fell vacant after the death of BJP’s sitting MLA, Karsanbhai Punjabhai Solanki, while election in Visavadar, which went to the AAP in the 2022 assembly polls, was necessitated due to the switchover of the MLA to the BJP.
Eager to retain the seat, the AAP has fielded Gopal Italia—among its most recognisable faces in Gujarat. Campaigning for Italia, former Delhi Chief Minister and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal called Congress a “first grade treacherous party”. Last year, the two parties had contested the Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat in an alliance.
Ludhiana West is expectedly witnessing an intense bipolar contest between Punjab’s ruling AAP, which has fielded its Rajya Sabha MP and businessman Sanjeev Arora, and the Congress. Even as they allied elsewhere in the 2024 general elections, the AAP and the Congress were fierce contenders in Punjab.
If the AAP retains the seat, which fell vacant due to the death of the sitting MLA, the party will get an opportunity to send either Kejriwal or former Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia to the Rajya Sabha. So far, the AAP has been insisting that Kejriwal has no plans to enter the Upper House.
At Nilambur, which falls under the Wayanad Lok Sabha constituency held by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Kerala’s ruling CPI(M) ran a fierce campaign led by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to retain the seat, which fell vacant after P.V.Anvar, the Left-backed independent MLA, quit in January after a major fallout with the CM.
After quitting, Anvar had initially pledged to back the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF). However, after the Congress fielded Aryadan Shoukath, the son of former party legislator from the seat Aryadan Muhammed, Anvar decided to enter the fray as a Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate.
Eventually, after failing to obtain the TMC symbol from the Election Commission, he decided to contest as an Independent candidate, further spicing up the race. Assembly elections are due in Kerala in less than a year, prompting both the ruling Left Democratic Front (LDF) and the opposition UDF to adopt an all-hands-on-deck approach for the lone seat.
In West Bengal, which also goes to the polls in early 2026, the ruling TMC is confident of retaining the minority-dominated Kaliganj seat—a factor that also influenced the candidate selection by the Congress-Left alliance. While the TMC has fielded Alifa Ahmed, daughter of the late sitting MLA Nasiruddin Ahmed, the Congress—which had won the seat in 2016—has named Kabil Uddin Sheikh as its candidate.
Counting of votes will take place 23 June.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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