Dear Express Reader, In one way or another, the spotlight has been on the Opposition. The week began with another call for Opposition unity, this time under a new banner - of the "All India Federation for Social Justice", floated by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin in Chennai. And it ended with Sharad Pawar, NCP chief, breaking ranks with 19 Opposition parties, and questioning the motives of those "targeting" the Adani Group. This week, too, the Budget session of Parliament ended on an impasse, with the Opposition demanding a JPC on the Adani matter and the government refusing. And 14 Opposition parties, which had gone to the SC alleging that they are being targeted by the ED and CBI, were snubbed by the apex court. It is still too early for Opposition unity, of course. Rahul Gandhi's disqualification from Parliament may have set the warning bells ringing in the non-BJP space, but the terms on which jointness among parties with different and conflicting interests, locations and trajectories can be achieved, the negotiation that this will require, the shape it will take, will only be clearer much closer to 2024. For now, two questions seem more interesting. The first was touched off by the court's rejection of the Opposition plea. Political parties do not deserve special consideration or protection, it said, and the solution to the Opposition's problem lies in politics, not in court. The Opposition rightly points to the growing unevenness of the playing field because it is at the receiving end of the full might of a vengeful government. In a constitutional democracy, the court also has a responsibility to apply the check and keep the balance so that the space for the institution of the Opposition, not just individual Opposition parties, is protected. And yet, the question, as the court suggested, is primarily political, and the Opposition must find the answer to it politically. The question is, then: For the Opposition, what is the political way out of here? The Congress argues, as its president Mallikarjun Kharge reiterated in this paper's Idea Exchange programme this week, that the Bharat Jodo Yatra was such a political response. But was it, really? At the end of the 4,000 km walkathon, Rahul Gandhi may have briefly swum into public focus, he may even have achieved a long-lasting personal breakthrough. But there is little evidence yet of the political effort needed to link his speech bubbles to his party on one end and the people on the other. The Rahul-Congress, it often seems, continues not to bestir itself, except sporadically and erratically. It continues to cast the onus on the people. They must return it to power, because of forces of rote anti-incumbency, and because the law of political nature dictates that what goes up (read Modi-BJP) must then come down. A lot of the Opposition homework is still not done. The "democracy/constitution under siege" argument needs to be framed in more imaginative ways, for one, to connect it to the lifeworlds of ordinary people, instead of only describing the predicament of a few embattled players. A balance must be found between local concerns and national themes, issues that speak to parts and those that speak to wholes. Choices must be made, at every step, on the nature of the mobilisation and its priorities - how it will combine and weave together nationalism and jobs, federalism and economic development, India's place in the world, secularism and social justice, Mandir and Mandal. The Stalin initiative that was kicked off this week seeks to make "social justice" the glue that holds everything else together. Parties that participated in it made a pitch for a nation-wide caste census, and questioned reservation based on economic criteria. Stalin said: "The cure … is a single medicine: social justice". And: "We have seen in the past that the BJP's politics of communalism can be fought only through the politics of social justice", said Akhilesh Yadav of the SP. The second question thrown up by the roiling in the Opposition space this week, then, is related to the first and it is this: Can the politics of Mandal puncture Mandir consolidation? The question itself is not new, but over the years, the answer has grown more complicated. When the BJP, the party of a paltry two MPs, first rose to prominence and power on the back of the campaign for the Ram temple at Ayodhya in the 1990s, the non-BJP parties sought to combat Mandir with Mandal. The calculation was that the project of homogenisation based on religion could be pierced and scattered by caste. To some extent, this was successful - many of the regional players that hold their own against the BJP today, even as the Congress slips and slides, especially in the Hindi heartland, were the products of Mandal. Of course, Mandal politics was not just a strategic riposte. It was also energised by a powerful promise of social justice, and it mobilised new constituencies that have led to the deepening of democracy. But the complication, today, is that the BJP did not stay in its corner, it did not confine itself to the politics and platform of Mandir - it used it as the springboard to cross over into the fiefs and domains carved out by the Mandal parties. It spotted the faultlines within large caste categories. It picked up, for instance, on the relative deprivations and rising aspirations of the non-Yadav OBCs, and of the non-Jatav SCs. The problem with resurrecting Mandal vs Mandir in 2023 is that the lines between the two don't seem as demarcated as they seemed to be in the 1990s, when both became the motifs of two separate political currents and movements. So, the question remains: Can a beleaguered Opposition find a political way? And will it do so in time, before 2024 comes? But the question could also be: Is the spotlight on the Opposition misplaced - because the BJP will lose, after all is said and done, when it is defeated not by the Opposition, but by the BJP? This week, and I suspect for many weeks coming up ahead, that's the curiosity. Till next week, Vandita | 
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