The INDIA opposition bloc called a strategy meeting in Delhi today. The two regional parties that just lost their home states didn’t come.
23 parties were invited. DMK isn’t attending — its leadership just watched Vijay’s TVK take Tamil Nadu in coalition with Congress, the rival they were supposed to beat. AAP and Congress accepted, but separately. Mamata Banerjee is in the city. She is not, technically, in the meeting.
The Two Empty Chairs
The INDIA bloc was built in Patna in 2023 on one promise: regional parties would carry their states, Congress would carry the centre, BJP would lose. Three years later, the regional anchors are gone.
DMK doesn’t see what the alliance offers anymore. Its principal rival now runs Tamil Nadu — and that rival’s deputy is Congress. Sitting in a Delhi conference room with the party that helped beat you in your own state requires a kind of strategic patience nobody in the DMK has shown interest in faking.
AAP and Congress did show up. They just won’t share a room. The two contested against each other in Delhi, Punjab, and Gujarat through 2024 and 2025. The Delhi Municipal Corporation rematch is months away. Whatever the “reset” produces today won’t survive it.
Mamata’s Other Meeting
Mamata Banerjee lost Bengal in April — 207 seats to the BJP, her own Bhabanipur seat to Suvendu Adhikari, now Bengal’s Chief Minister, TMC reduced from 215 to 80. She is in Delhi today. She is meeting TMC MPs. They are reportedly asking for a leadership change.
A reset meeting where TMC’s chief is in the next building managing an internal coup is not the kind of optics a fading alliance can absorb.
What the Photo Won’t Show
The bloc was designed to stop the BJP. The BJP just took a state it had never governed. The opposition’s two biggest regional parties just lost theirs. The Congress-led national strategy now depends on a coalition partner whose Tamil Nadu government runs against another bloc member.
The press will count the parties in the room. The number that matters is the seats those parties hold. After April, that number is much smaller. Resets work when the parts still fit together. These don’t.