The Gujarat Assembly will not have a leader of the opposition (LoP) for the first time in the history of the House, with speaker Shankar Chaudhary turning down the Congress’s request for it, saying the party does not have the numbers required to get the post. In the December 2022 assembly polls, Congress managed to get just 17 seats in the 182-member House. The seats are less than 10 per cent needed to get the LoP post.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) returned to power in the state with a record 156 seats. Chaudhary turned down the Congress’s request for the post on the first day of the Budget session on February 23, days after the party named Amit Chavda as its House leader after the assembly secretariat asked the party to furnish the name for it.
The party also proposed Chavda as the leader of the opposition. In 1985, the ruling Congress agreed to allow the Janata Party to have the leader of the opposition post even as the latter fell short of the required numbers.
Congress leader Manish Doshi told the media that the BJP could have taken a similar stand now. “Instead, it declined our request for LoP [post]… This will not stop us from raising the people’s voice in the assembly and outside.” The Congress has also been the second-largest party in Lok Sabha since 2014 but has not had the LoP post there as it secured less than 10 percent of seats in the lower House of Parliament in two successive national polls.
Ritu Rathi, a political activist based out of Surat, remarked, “The great Indian elections are nothing but a game of numbers with an improbable outcome, and this outcome for the opposition is surely a sign of a withering Congress.
How will they raise people’s voices, even as a responsible opposition?” She adds, “No matter what the Congress tries to portray as its party stand, they don’t seem to touch the nerve of an average Gujarati, for they don’t have well-oiled machinery like the BJP.
With the decaying organisational structure and entailing predicament, the only viable option for the opposition is to leverage social media to raise issues among the populace.” Doshi said they had a tough time getting answers from the BJP government, even when they had better numbers in the House. “It will become more challenging. But we will continue to raise the voice of the people of Gujarat in every possible way.”
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