Patna to New Delhi

Opposition will need to manage contradictions

The 15 political parties which resolved in Patna last week to fight together the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) currently run 11 state governments, and their legislators occupy 42 per cent of the 4,123 Assembly seats. These parties — the Janata Dal (United) and the undivided Shiv Sena had been BJP allies — together won 154 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, securing 223 million votes. Therefore, their challenge to the BJP, which bagged 303 seats with 229 million votes in 2019, is considerable. However, as several of these parties have discovered over successive elections since 2014, electoral arithmetic, strong