Venkaiah Naidu will be the new Vice President of India, having defeated his opponent Gopalkrishna Gandhi by 272 votes in the election. The result was expected, but the margin of victory is another cause of concern for the Opposition in the country that saw their candidate for the Vice Presidency getting less than the number of votes that had been pledged to him. As per claims from the National Democratic Alliance, almost two dozen MPs from the Opposition parties decided to vote for Naidu over Gandhi. Naidu had been pledged 495 votes and received 516 in the poll, while Gandhi polled merely 244, less than the margin of victory.
Cross voting in favour of the NDA nominee had also taken place a few weeks earlier at the Presidential election when Ram Nath Kovind had been elected defeating Meira Kumar. The Opposition, however, is taking solace in the fact that their Vice Presidential candidate got 19 more votes from the MPs, than their Presidential nominee Kumar had received in the Presidential election. They see this as a ‘positive thing’ that in the presidential election the Opposition candidate got 225 votes and in the vice presidential election their candidate got 244 votes. But, what is glossed over is the fact that there were 40 more MPs who had pledged their vote to him, than to Meira, so it denotes that 21 of them broke the pledge to vote for the NDA nominee.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi, himself, admitted that the number of votes he received was ‘beyond expectation’. Gandhi went further ahead to say that the votes he secured in the election were an affirmation of ‘the right to free thought and speech’ and that the MPs and parties that backed him did so for what they felt was the ‘national good’. Gandhi, said his votes were an affirmation of ‘the right to free thought and speech and the duty to serve pluralism and secularism’. Against the background of intolerance that is being seen in various parts of the country, pluralism and secularism are slowly being erased from the slate.
One of the parties that had pledged its support to Gandhi in the election was the Janata Dal (U), that between the time it made the pledge and the election, moved to the NDA. The Opposition in the country is definitely finding itself being pushed to a corner. Across the country in various States the opposition is being decimated. Most recently it was in Bihar, where an NDA government was installed, after the BJP propped up JD(U)’s Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister, a day after he resigned and broke ties with the Rashtriya Janata Dal of Lalu Prasad Yadav, with whom he had been in alliance with.
Politically, the election of Naidu to the Vice Presidency is important to the NDA as it could help the alliance to make inroads in the southern States, where currently they have not been able to make much of a mark. This could now change, giving the NDA a better opportunity to expand here, which could lead to finishing any opposition that still exists.
A strong and vibrant democracy depends on a strong opposition and since 2014, the main opposition party Congress, has not been able to play this role. After the debacle of the Lok Sabha poll, instead of strengthening the party organisation and attempting to rebuild, Congress has allowed itself to be decimated in State after State. Even in Goa, where it emerged as the single largest party, it was unable to form the government. The elections to the post of President and Vice President have shown that Congress and the Opposition are unable to hold their house together. It is advantage NDA, as the opposition slips again.
