The Sixty Per Cent That Never Adds Up

This is the fifth part of a six-part series on the invisible machines of Indian democracy.

Part 1 explained the two main machines in Indian politics: one is voluntary and built over generations through unpaid work, while the other is funded by the state. Part 2 explored the Sangh’s century-old network. Part 3 examined where the national machine falls short, especially in Tamil Nadu, Bengal, and Kerala. Part 4 outlined four sources of political money in India today: branded welfare, the voluntary machine, the megaphone, and the parallel economy. This part focuses on the other side of this system: the opposition.

About sixty per cent of Indian voters do not support the BJP. This number has stayed about the same for the past ten years. In theory, it is enough for the opposition to form a national government.

It never adds up.

This is the main puzzle. The math for bringing the opposition together has been clear for ten years, but it has never come together. This did not happen in 2014, 2019, or even in 2024 when the INDIA bloc came closest, or after the May 2026 results when the bloc broke apart. The real question now is not why the opposition keeps losing, but why the sixty per cent never unite into a majority.

There are three reasons for this. The first is about numbers, the second is about organisation, and the third is about structure. None of these can be solved by making better seat-sharing deals alone. After the May 2026 results, these issues are clear enough that we can now state openly what many have only hinted at.

The sixty per cent is not one electorate

Let us start with what sixty per cent actually means.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the BJP got about 36.6 per cent of the vote. Its allies added another 6 or 7 per cent, so the NDA had around 43 per cent overall. The rest, which we call the sixty per cent, is not one group. It includes Congress at 21 per cent and a mix of about a dozen regional parties, each with 1 to 4 per cent.

Congress’s share of the vote has remained within the same band across three elections: 19.3 per cent in 2014, 19.5 per cent in 2019, and 21.2 per cent in 2024. This is a long way below the 25-plus per cent Congress used to receive even during its losing years in the 1990s. The vote share does not fall further. It also does not rise much. There is a core group of voters across the country who always support Congress, no matter what. However, this group is not large enough to form a government in most states or to give it a clear majority to form the government at the centre.

The regional patchwork is the more interesting half. The TMC in Bengal. The DMK and now the TVK in Tamil Nadu. The SP in Uttar Pradesh. The RJD in Bihar. The AAP in Delhi and Punjab. The BJD in Odisha. The YSRCP in Andhra Pradesh. The two Sena factions in Maharashtra. The two NCP factions in Maharashtra. The two Lefts in Kerala. The JMM in Jharkhand. The AIMIM, the JD(S), and the various smaller formations.

Each of these parties exists because it controls one state or part of a state. The leaders get their power from being strong in that state. The party workers focus on state-level goals. Their funding, candidates, symbols, and language are all specific to their state.

This is where the structural problem starts.

To bring the sixty per cent together nationally, state leaders would have to accept a national leader above them. Someone would need to be the national face, lead meetings, and handle seat-sharing talks across all states and Union Territories. Whoever takes this role becomes more important than the state leaders.

Mamata Banerjee cannot accept being under Akhilesh Yadav and still be the clear leader in Bengal. M K Stalin cannot accept being under Mamata and still lead Tamil Nadu. Akhilesh cannot accept being under a Congress leader and still lead his coalition in Uttar Pradesh. For the opposition to unite, each would have to give up the state-level power that defines their role.

This is not just about personal pride. It is a structural issue. If a regional party leader accepts a national leader above them, they stop being the main leader in their state. They become a deputy to the national group. Everyone: voters, workers, funders, and rivals see this. The party’s state-level purpose starts to fade as soon as its leader is no longer in full control.

The INDIA bloc, launched in Patna in June 2023, sought to address this problem by forming a coalition of equals. It worked for one election. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the alliance won 234 seats while the NDA got 293. The '400 paar’ campaign helped the opposition stay united. But once that election ended, the old problem returned.

The Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi collapsed in November 2024. The AAP lost Delhi in February 2025. The Bihar Mahagathbandhan collapsed in November 2025. In May 2026, the TMC and the DMK fell together. Within days, the Tamil Nadu Congress walked out of the alliance with the DMK and signalled support for the new TVK government. By that point, INDIA was no longer a bloc. It was a distant memory.

Six states saw their opposition alliances fall apart in just eighteen months. Each collapse occurred for the same structural reasons and was exacerbated by the parties’ failure to learn from prior failures.

The high command is the architecture, not the bug

Now let’s look at the second reason.

Even when an opposition party wins, it cannot necessarily govern the state it has won. Kerala in May 2026 is the cleanest illustration. The UDF won 102 of 140 seats. The Congress won 63. V D Satheesan, who had led the campaign for two years and had publicly staked his political career on a 100-seat target, was the obvious chief ministerial face.

It took ten days to officially appoint him.

The ten days were spent in Delhi. K C Venugopal, the Congress general secretary and Rahul Gandhi’s closest aide, staked his own claim. So did Ramesh Chennithala, the senior loyalist who had led the party in the previous cycle. AICC observers were dispatched. Meetings ran late into the night at Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence. Camps mobilised on the streets of Thiruvananthapuram. Torchlight marches. Flex boards. Public demonstrations of factional strength within days of an electoral victory.

By the time Satheesan was chosen, the excitement of the win had faded. The leader who led the campaign was finally confirmed as the one who would govern. But the way this happened showed every party worker what they already believed: the Congress high command does not let the campaign leader become the governing leader without a struggle, even after a big win.

This is not a new problem. The same pattern has appeared in four different states.

Rajasthan in 2018. Ashok Gehlot won the campaign. Sachin Pilot had led the organisation’s rebuild. The high command sat on the decision for days. The eventual Gehlot-Pilot compromise produced five years of instability and a 2023 defeat.

Madhya Pradesh in 2018. Kamal Nath was named CM over Jyotiraditya Scindia, who was the public face of the campaign. The compromise collapsed within eighteen months. Scindia took twenty-two MLAs to the BJP. The state has remained with the BJP since.

Andhra Pradesh, fifteen years earlier. The high command chose K Rosaiah over Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy after Y S R died in 2009, despite overwhelming sentiment in favour of Jagan’s succession. Jagan founded his own party. The Congress has not won Andhra Pradesh since.

Kerala in May 2026 is another example. The high command eventually chose Satheesan, but the ten-day delay sent a clear message. The state leader’s power is temporary and depends on Delhi’s approval. It can be taken away at any time.

This is why the high command is not just a problem, but the core structure of Congress. The party is built around the high command, not just affected by it. Fixing this would mean changing the whole system. The high command keeps the family in control of the party, and everyone in the party knows it. Any state leader who challenges the high command eventually learns that the high command would rather lose a state than lose its own power.

Karnataka is the live illustration. Siddaramaiah and D K Shivakumar have been in an unresolved leadership standoff for over two years. The high command’s solution, a rotational chief ministership, has been described by one senior journalist as “a cardinal mistake”. The Shivakumar camp now openly cites the Kerala precedent of high command override. The state government runs while the leadership question remains in suspended animation.

Himachal Pradesh is the smaller-scale version. The Sukhu-Pratibha Singh tension has shaped Congress politics in the state for two years. Vikramaditya Singh and his mother stayed away from the Sukhu government’s three-year event in December 2025. The tension is structural. It will not be resolved because resolving it would require either the family or the chief minister to lose.

This is what it looks like when a party wins states but cannot really govern them. If you cannot govern the states you win, you cannot bring the sixty per cent together. Building unity starts with having strong leaders at the state level, and that means letting the winning leader actually govern.

The family-party variant and the consultancy substitute

The Congress high command is not the only reason for organisational problems among the opposition. It is just the most well-known. Another major issue is parties run by families.

Almost every major opposition formation is family-run. The TMC under Mamata and her nephew Abhishek. The RJD under Lalu and his son Tejashwi. The SP under Mulayam and now Akhilesh. The Sena under Bala Saheb and now Uddhav. The NCP under Sharad Pawar, before the family split. The DMK under Karunanidhi, then Stalin, and now also his son Udhayanidhi. The Congress under three generations of Gandhis.

Family-run parties have a unique problem: they cannot handle leadership changes without a crisis. The older leader cannot easily step aside because the party belongs to the family. The heir cannot take over without pushing out the elder, which risks splitting the party. Non-family members cannot compete easily because the family controls tickets, money, and the party symbol.

This leads to a repeating cycle. The party forms around the founder, who builds an organisation that the heir cannot run on their own. The heir then creates a separate group within the party. These two groups are often in conflict. Elections test this setup: if the party wins, the conflict is put off; if it loses, the conflict becomes public.

Bengal in May 2026 is the cleanest current example. Within five days of the verdict, named TMC legislators were on the record. A former minister called the government corrupt and said it deserved to be cast away. Other elected representatives blamed factionalism. Lobbies were named. The nephew was named. The professional consultancy that had run the campaign was named. The party suspended three spokespersons for anti-party remarks.

This brings us to another major problem: relying on consultancies rather than building a strong party base.

The TMC has worked with the Indian Political Action Committee, or I-PAC, since 2019. The consultancy, founded in 2013 as Citizens for Accountable Governance by Prashant Kishor, is now led by Pratik Jain. For seven years, I-PAC handled the TMC’s voter data, micro-targeting, narrative coordination, candidate feedback, and message discipline. It claimed to reach 8 crore individuals in Bengal during the 2026 cycle through 12 modules over 2 years.

After the verdict, the Trinamool Lok Sabha Chief Whip, Kalyan Banerjee, spoke about I-PAC on the record. His complaint was sharp. The consultancy, he said, had destroyed the TMC organisation. It had sown discord among potential candidates by telling many of them that their feedback was the best and their tickets were assured. Those who did not get tickets grew resentful and turned to the BJP. The consultancy, in his framing, had weakened the party.

A senior leader from another opposition formation, the Shiv Sena UBT, endorsed the complaint on the same day. He said the consultancy model itself was the problem, and that the grievance Banerjee had named was shared by workers across many parties from Bihar to other states.

At this point, it is important to be careful.

We need to be honest about what this complaint does and does not establish. A sitting Chief Whip naming a consultancy from inside an opposition formation is a significant event. It is the first time a senior elected representative has publicly named the model itself. The grievance is real. Workers across multiple parties have been saying versions of it privately for years.

But this complaint is not the whole story. Consultancies are just tools. Political parties choose to hire them and decide what work to give them. Parties also choose what to build themselves and what to leave to consultants. Blaming the consultancy is often a way to avoid thinking about the leadership choices that led to this dependence.

The TMC decided to rely on a consultancy for seven years. It did not build its own party base during that time. It allowed the consultancy to act as a go-between for leaders and workers, and even handle candidate selection. In short, the party outsourced work that it should have done itself.

A quick disclosure: I run WarRoom Strategies, a political communications consultancy with offices in four Indian cities. My firm competes directly with I-PAC and other similar companies. So these are observations from someone inside the industry, not just an outside critic. Here is what I have seen.

Consultancies are useful within their limits. They can run sophisticated voter data operations. They can produce disciplined campaign messaging. They can manage the surface texture of a candidate’s communication. They can identify constituency-level swing patterns or even grade the aspiring candidates based on their winning capabilities. None of this is fake. All of it is real, paid work that adds value when used well.

But consultancies cannot replace the work that a political party must do on its own. They cannot build a strong base of party workers. They cannot create the kind of volunteer network that lasts between elections. They cannot inspire loyalty among unpaid workers. They also cannot do the slow, steady organising that takes years and only shows results over many election cycles.

The difference with the BJP is built into the system. The Sangh has spent a hundred years building its volunteer network, with 73,000 shakhas and 2,500 organisations. That is a century of unpaid work. I-PAC has existed for only 13 years, and other firms even less. Even if every consultancy did its best, it could not match what the Sangh has built. This kind of infrastructure takes time, volunteer effort, and shared beliefs, none of which can be bought.

The lesson for opposition parties is simple: pick your consultants carefully. Understand what they offer before you agree. Set clear limits on their role. Do not let them take over the work that only the party should do. And do not be fooled by the marketing hype that consultancies, like any business, create about themselves. The BJP continues to work with the consultancies, but they know how to work with them.

The TMC’s result in Bengal partly reflects its sole reliance on consultancies. More importantly, it shows the impact of leadership decisions that led to this dependence. A consultancy can only do what its client allows.

The absorption economy

We have now covered two reasons: the math problem and the organisational failures in opposition leadership. The third reason is what the BJP has built that the opposition has not.

The cleanest way to see it is the chief ministers’ list.

Six of the BJP’s current chief ministers started their political careers in other parties. Suvendu Adhikari in Bengal began with the Congress, moved to the TMC, and joined the BJP in December 2020. Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam was a Congress minister for nearly two decades before joining the BJP in 2015. Manik Saha, in Tripura, joined the BJP after leaving the Congress in 2016. Samrat Choudhary, the first BJP CM of Bihar, came through the RJD and the JD(U) before joining the BJP in 2017. Pema Khandu in Arunachal Pradesh was a Congress MLA before switching to the People’s Party of Arunachal and later aligning with the BJP. N Biren Singh in Manipur was a Congress leader and minister before joining the BJP in 2017.

This is not by chance. It is now the main way the BJP grows in states. Where the BJP lacks a strong organisation, it brings in a senior leader from another party, gives them the top position, and lets them bring their own networks and support base.

This approach is known as the absorption economy.

The legal scaffolding for it is the Tenth Schedule, the 1985 anti-defection law. The law was meant to prevent defections by requiring a two-thirds split for a faction to merge with another party without disqualification. In practice, over the past decade, the law has been re-engineered into a price mechanism.

The Maharashtra Sena split in June 2022 is the cleanest demonstration. Eknath Shinde took forty of fifty-five Sena MLAs. In early 2024, the Speaker ruled that the Shinde faction was the real Shiv Sena because it commanded the legislative majority. This effectively re-imported the split defence that the original 1985 law had been amended to remove. The Supreme Court accepted the outcome. The legal grammar of defection had been rewritten.

The signal sent to every regional party from this episode was unambiguous. A sufficiently large faction, backed by central agency cover and a friendly speaker, can capture the party name, the symbol, and the legislative wing. Sharad Pawar’s NCP found that out in 2023. The original Shiv Sena had found out a year earlier. Various smaller formations have found out since.

The opposition does not have a similar system for absorbing leaders. It is not for lack of trying, but because it cannot build one. Creating such a system requires control over central agencies, influence over speaker decisions in many states, the ability to offer chief minister positions, and legal protection when challenged. Only a party in power at the national level can provide all of this.

This is the final part of the structural argument. The BJP does not just have a stronger organisation; it also has a system that turns opposition wins into chances to recruit new leaders. When an opposition party wins a state, its top leaders start getting offers. When it loses, defections happen even faster. The Tenth Schedule sets the rules, central agencies handle legal risks, and the chief minister’s position is the reward.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta has named this asymmetry. In a normal democratic system, he has written, opportunism by one party can be balanced by opportunism by another. The two cancel each other out. What India has now is one-sided opportunism. The BJP can absorb the opposition. The opposition cannot absorb the BJP. The asymmetry is the structural condition.

Three closing observations

We have looked at three main issues: the math problem that stops state leaders from accepting a national leader; the organisational failures in opposition parties (whether from the Congress high command, family-run parties, or reliance on consultancies); and the BJP’s absorption system that turns opposition wins into recruitment opportunities. Here are three final thoughts.

First, the sixty per cent never comes together because real unity requires an organisation capable of handling leadership changes. The BJP has this, but none of the opposition parties does. Congress faces a crisis every time its leadership changes. The TMC cannot change leaders without public conflict. The DMK managed one leadership change, but another is coming. Many regional parties are led by their founders, so they have not resolved the succession problem. Until opposition parties build organisations larger than their leaders, every attempt at unity will fall apart during the next leadership crisis.

Second, consultancies cannot replace the work that political parties must do themselves. This is now clear from what TMC leaders have said publicly, and it will become clear in other parties as they face losses. The main lesson for opposition leaders is this: if you outsource your party’s core work, you make your future depend on a contract that can end at any time. The Sangh spent a hundred years building an organisation that no contract can match. The opposition is trying to buy in thirteen years what took the Sangh a century. The numbers do not add up.

Third, the opposition is not losing just because it is divided. It is divided because the system that pulls it apart has grown stronger, while the foundations that could hold it together have not been built. The chance for unity that appeared after the 2024 Lok Sabha election is now gone. The six-state collapses from November 2024 to May 2026 have made this division almost permanent. The next big tests will be the 2027 Uttar Pradesh election, the 2028 Karnataka election, and the 2029 Lok Sabha election. If opposition parties keep repeating old patterns, the sixty per cent will keep breaking apart, and the BJP will keep gaining from each split.

This situation is not permanent. It is called structural only because no opposition party has built what is needed to change it. The first party to do so will have a real chance. So far, none of the current parties seems to be trying.

Part 6 of this series will be published on 7 June. It will discuss the idea of the budget line as the ballot box, looking at how the state-funded system works and the institutions behind it. This will be the final part of the series.

You can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 by clicking here.

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tushar(at)tusharpanchal(dot)co

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tushar(at)warroom(dot)live

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