Sanjaya Baru | Regionals' national role: Mapping a path to 2024
Deccan ChronicleNext week the seventeenth Lok Sabha crosses the halfway mark of its five-year term. Surprisingly, though, the non-BJP parties have been slow in demanding greater accountability for the PM’s mishandling of the China challenge, even though Rahul Gandhi did not miss the opportunity to tweet that “our national security is unpardonably compromised because GOI has no strategy and ‘Mr 56’ is scared”. More than the mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic and China, it is the continued under performance of the economy, contributing to rising inflation and poverty and subdued employment growth, that has dented Prime Minister Modi’s image, and is offering a ray of hope of improved electoral performance to the non-BJP political parties. Some political analysts have argued that “regional” leaders like Mamata Banerjee cannot hope to pose a challenge to a “national” leader like Mr Modi. The one thing that the non-BJP parties, especially the Sonia Congress, have to come to terms with is the fact that the BJP is the only pan-India political party today with a national vote base, according to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, of 37 per cent.