The Opposition & the Dhankhar bombshell

THE Congress-helmed INDIA bloc might just have found an issue to corner an overconfident BJP in the ongoing monsoon session of Parliament. The subjects that the Opposition alliance has been preoccupied with — Operation Sindoor, the Pahalgam massacre and the revision of voters rolls in Bihar — are riddled with uncomfortable questions, but the government believes it can weather these storms. On Monday — the day Parliament opened — Jagdeep Dhankhar, Vice-President and Rajya Sabha chairman, resigned, citing health concerns.

As the West Bengal Governor, Dhankhar had face-offs with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee; later, he had run-ins with the Congress and the Opposition while presiding over the Rajya Sabha. His resignation at the end of the day’s proceedings — he was present almost throughout in the Upper House and attended a meeting of the business advisory committee (BAC) — was nothing short of a bombshell.

Dhankhar’s entry into the BJP had been celebrated as a ‘prize catch’ and he was projected as a Jat ‘import’ from the Congress. Although PM Narendra Modi commiserated with him on Tuesday, the Opposition was quick to lend a shoulder to the same person against whom it brought a notice of ‘removal’ for his ‘partisan’ conduct as the Rajya Sabha Chairman, suggesting that political allegiances are no longer relevant in a state of flux.

The Opposition pointed out that Dhankhar had convened a BAC meeting on Tuesday and was expected to make “major announcements related to the judiciary”. The judiciary was one of Dhankhar’s pet peeves. A former Supreme Court lawyer, he termed the 2015 judgment striking down the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) Act as a “glaring instance” of “severe compromise” of parliamentary sovereignty and disregard for the “mandate of the people”. Dhankhar added that Parliament was duty-bound to raise the issue and expressed confidence that “it will do so”. Was it one of his anticipated major announcements related to the NJAC Act that would have set the government at war with the judiciary?

Among his other contentious assertions was a call to “reflect and give quietus to public display of adversarially challenging stance/trading or exchange of advisories emanating from these platforms (constitutional institutions)”. To contextualise why this might have embarrassed the Centre, the Opposition was insistent on a discussion in the House on alleged government interference in the functioning of constitutional bodies.

Dhankhar’s assertions on upholding the sovereignty of Parliament and the legislature and emphasising that the legislative, the executive and the judiciary were “required to be within their limits” could have become disputatious.

After the seizure of currency notes from the residence of a high court judge in New Delhi, Dhankhar had revived the debate on the NJAC, stating that had the Supreme Court not struck down the mechanism for judicial appointments, “things would have been different”. However, the apex court was firm on maintaining the supremacy of the judiciary in the selection and appointment of SC and HC judges.

The last twist in the tale came when Dhankhar announced in the Upper House that a motion was moved by the Opposition, signed by the required number of members, to constitute a statutory committee to look into the judge’s removal. The announcement upset members of the treasury benches as they thought he had pre-empted a similar move by the ruling coalition against the judge. Government sources suggested that Dhankhar was “in a hurry” to bring in the motion to further “sharpen his attack” against the judiciary, but this was not entirely to the government’s liking. The Centre apparently preferred a slower approach.

The seeds of a controversy have doubtless been sown, but can the Opposition reap a rich harvest? The INDIA bloc was shaken up a second time when the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) quit the alliance last week, the first being when Nitish Kumar, the Janata Dal (United)) leader and Bihar Chief Minister, left the front in January 2024 and rejoined the BJP-led NDA.

While Nitish was not on the best terms with his erstwhile ally, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, and possibly viewed the BJP as more productive electorally, AAP never regarded the Congress as a friend with whom it could coexist with equanimity. Its equation with the Congress was damaged irretrievably during the 2025 Delhi Assembly polls. The BJP decimated AAP, but the Congress was left with nothing except savouring the defeat of Arvind Kejriwal, who had brought the grand old party to ruin in the Capital.

The AAP exit came a day before the Opposition convened a rare meeting — INDIA had not assembled even once after the 2024 Lok Sabha polls — to craft the floor strategy for the monsoon session of Parliament. The idea was to collectively confront the BJP; AAP’s tactical explanation was that while being on the Opposition’s side it was not part of a joint enterprise as it wanted to nurture its space in the states without getting into the tricky debate of aligning with the Congress or not. Obviously, AAP’s recent win in the Gujarat assembly bypoll against the BJP, pushing the Congress to the third spot, boosted its aspirations.

Saturday’s INDIA meeting — it was a virtual one ostensibly because the constituents were preoccupied with internal confabulations — saw the Congress in full strength, with M Mallikarjun Kharge, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi in attendance. Big leaguers like the DMK and Trinamool Congress (TMC) chiefs and chief ministers MK Stalin and Mamata Banerjee did not show up. Mamata deputed her nephew — TMC’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee — and Stalin sent senior MP Tiruchi N Siva.

Maintaining an equipoise between national issues and federal preoccupations is not the smoothest exercise even for master political craftsmen, unless one party foists its agenda on the smaller entities in a coalition. The fault lines inherent in the imbalanced INDIA surfaced in the reported discussions. The principal problem is that the Congress, which heads the bloc and is the only party with a pan-India presence, is a shadow of its former self. Regional parties think they have it in them to humble the BJP.

The Dhankhar issue will be a test of how far the Congress and INDIA can go in exploiting the situation — that’s if they hang together.

Radhika Ramaseshan is a senior journalist.

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