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Now that the anti-BJP Opposition is back in strength in the 18th Lok Sabha after the Indian National Democratic Inclusive Alliance parties won 232 of the 543 seats and the conglomerate of regional and smaller parties have earned bragging rights, it’s time for leaders of these parties to return to the battlefield. Narendra Modi may have been reduced to leading a minority government but the BJP still remains a formidable political machine. The time to engage in the byzantine workings in New Delhi’s rarified environment has not arrived for Rahul Gandhi or Akhilesh Yadav, not even Supriya Sule and Abhishek Banerjee, who are still understudies even though they packed a punch in this election.

With others like Uddhav and Aaditya Thackeray, M.K. Stalin and Udhaynidhi, and Tejashwi Yadav, these torchbearers of the political aristocracy must go back to fortifying the trenches, connecting with the popular sovereign, managing the organisational networks and strengthening the bases they have retaken from the BJP.



The representative of Indian politics’ middle ground, bookended by the extreme-right BJP-RSS and the Left, the Congress as the largest national party, Samajwadi Party, Nationalist Congress Party, DMK, Trinamul Congress and the RJD have to work on the ground to foil the recapture of the median voter and the space they compelled the BJP to vacate. This election is certainly historic, but not because Mr Modi became PM for the third time, matching Jawaharlal Nehru’s record. .

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