Rahul, Mamata, Akhilesh and Stalin: Inside the Power Struggles Tearing Apart the INDIA Opposition Alliance

On September 27 last year, 41 people died in a crowd crush at a rally organised by actor-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) in Karur, Tamil Nadu. The tragedy shook the state. Chief Minister M. K. Stalin announced compensation and an inquiry commission. A first information report was filed against TVK organisers. Then Rahul Gandhi called Vijay.

It was a gesture of condolence, publically. But politically, it was read as something more consequential. The leader of the national Opposition had opened a direct line with the man who was rapidly emerging as the main threat to Congress’ oldest and most important southern ally, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

Stalin had campaigned with Rahul across multiple elections and publicly described him as his “elder brother”. The Congress, some believed, was beginning to look beyond an alliance that had once seemed foundational to the Opposition’s national project.

The 2026 Assembly election results made visible the unresolved tension that now runs through nearly every major relationship inside the INDIA bloc. From Mamata Banerjee in Bengal to the DMK in Tamil Nadu, and even the alliance’s last relatively functional partnership, with Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh.

What remains is not a formally broken coalition, but one strained by competing ambitions and the absence of any shared understanding of who leads, who follows, and what the alliance is ultimately for.

Mood, Not Manifesto

The INDIA bloc announced itself in June 2023 with 28 parties, but no common minimum programme. The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments of 2004 and 2009 had one. In coalitions, it forces parties to agree on something. The INDIA bloc did not produce one because agreement would have exposed the depth of disagreement.

What the parties agreed on instead was opposition to Narendra Modi, a mood, not a manifesto.

Political strategist and VoteVibe founder Amitabh Tiwari says: “It was essentially soup put together in which many parties in the so-called alliance were competing and contesting against each other. It was just any party that was anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) without any ideological basis. For it to be a true alliance, how could it have the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Congress in Bengal, and the Left and the Congress in Kerala, contesting against each other?”

“There was no common minimum programme, no regular meetings. When parties started feeling that the Congress was at the front, this was considered a legitimate claim at leadership. And that did not apply, as the Congress is no longer seen as a party with a legitimate claim to lead. The Congress is seen going after the regional parties. They have even spoken against them in some places, in Bengal, against the TMC. People feel that the Congress is working against the INDIA bloc partners. What they are now doing is shedding ‘crocodile tears’ about what is happening to their INDIA alliance partners,” he says.

The contradiction was built into the bloc’s structure from the start. In Bengal, the Congress and the TMC fought each other even as their national leaders shared platforms. In Kerala, the Left and the Congress remained rivals while appearing under the same Opposition umbrella. In Delhi, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Congress alternated between alliance rhetoric and direct competition. The coalition managed to temporarily contain these tensions during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, enough to restrict the BJP to 240 seats and deny it a majority on its own. But the absence of structure soon showed.

Janata Dal (United) leader Nitish Kumar’s attempt to position himself as the bloc’s national convener was stalled, notably by Mamata herself. Within weeks, he returned to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), later becoming the chief minister of Bihar after the November 2025 elections. The bloc has held only five formal meetings since its formation.

Undefined Relationship

Of all the strained relationships in the INDIA bloc, none exposes its central failure more starkly than the one between Rahul and Mamata, a partnership that never settled into a clear definition of what it was meant to be.

The Congress contested all 294 seats independently in Bengal for the first time in two decades. Rahul directly targeted the TMC, calling Mamata’s government a “reign of terror” and accusing it of running a goon raj, suppressing opposing voices, and being soft on the BJP. After a Congress worker was killed in Asansol, he wrote: “In West Bengal today, it is not democracy but the TMC’s reign of terror that prevails. Intimidating, attacking, and eliminating opposing voices after votes are cast, this has become the defining character of the TMC.” He also questioned why central agencies appeared “far gentler” with Mamata than with the Congress leadership. At the same time, the Congress continued to insist on the idea of a united Opposition platform, keeping Mamata within the INDIA bloc even as it fought her politically on the ground.

Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Priyanka Chaturvedi points to exactly that contradiction from within the alliance from an alliance partners’ perspective: “In West Bengal, when Mamata Banerjee was campaigning so hard and staying active, what did Rahul Gandhi do in the last lap? The way he started talking about her sent the wrong signal.”

The BJP won 207 seats. The TMC was reduced to 80. Mamata lost her own Bhabanipur constituency to Suvendu Adhikari. Soon after, Rahul posted on X warning that those “gloating” over the TMC’s defeat must not indulge in petty politics. He had spent weeks calling Mamata’s government a reign of terror. He now had to tell his own workers to stop celebrating her defeat.

A day later, Mamata addressed the press at her Kalighat home. She thanked the INDIA bloc leaders by name, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Hemant Soren, Tejashwi Yadav, and said Akhilesh would meet her the following day. “Now my target is clear,” she said. “I will strengthen the INDIA bloc.” She described herself as “a free bird”, and added that she had already made clear what she would do with other INDIA bloc leaders.

While it was a statement of striking political discipline from a leader who had every reason to be bitter, but the question it raises is the same one that hangs over the bloc itself. Is this a genuine commitment to a national opposition project, or tactical repositioning after defeat?

Political commentator Manisha Priyam argues the deeper problem is structural, not personal. Leaders such as Stalin, Mamata, and Akhilesh Yadav once had the political weight to anchor national opposition space independent of the Congress. Electoral setbacks and shrinking influence have weakened that possibility. “Unless the alliance shares who the leaders are,” she tells Outlook, “it cannot present itself as a viable alternative.” With the Congress holding roughly 100 Lok Sabha seats, it lacks the arithmetic to naturally claim leadership. But regional leaders no longer command what they once did either. The bloc risks remaining a rhetorical coalition, visible in form, but without a stable centre of authority.

Last Functional Relationship

In April 2026, three weeks before the Bengal and Tamil Nadu results, Akhilesh was at a wedding in Haryana’s Rewari when a reporter asked him about the 2027 Uttar Pradesh elections. He replied: “INDIA bloc will remain; we will have the Congress with us. For us, the issue is not about the number of seats. It’s about winnability. Those who can win will get the ticket.”

After the Tamil Nadu results came, Akhilesh posted photographs of himself with Mamata and Stalin on social media with the words: “We are not the ones who abandon each other in times of difficulty.” He did not need to name Congress.

The Rahul-Akhilesh relationship is the one functional bilateral partnership that remains inside the INDIA bloc and it is worth understanding precisely because it is complicated enough to be real. In 2024, the two campaigned together across Uttar Pradesh and the result: the BJP restricted to 33 of the state’s 80 Lok Sabha seats. It worked because Rahul’s sustained campaign around constitutional protection and reservation rights reached Dalit communities who had not traditionally been Samajwadi Party (SP) voters. Akhilesh brought his Other Backward Classes (OBCs) base, his organisational network across the districts, and his credibility as someone who had governed Uttar Pradesh. Together, they assembled a social coalition that neither could have built alone.

Senior analyst Sharat Pradhan is direct about the arithmetic that keeps this relationship intact. The SP’s 2024 performance, he says, was significantly aided by Dalit support that shifted because of Rahul’s campaign on the Constitution and reservation. Akhilesh understands that without the Congress alongside him, replicating that Dalit-OBC coalition would be very difficult. Asked whether a separation between the SP and the Congress is politically viable in Uttar Pradesh, Pradhan is unequivocal: it would be “politically disastrous’ for Akhilesh. He describes the recent public tensions as political posturing rather than a sign of imminent rupture. He also cautions that the BJP remains in permanent election mode in Uttar Pradesh, leaving little room for experimentation.

The Southern Pivot

The Karur phone call was the beginning. What followed in Tamil Nadu was the unravelling of one of the Opposition’s most credible and long-standing southern alignments.

The Congress had been pushing for a larger seat share in Tamil Nadu than the DMK was prepared to concede, and the alliance entered the campaign under visible strain. Rahul’s limited joint appearances with Stalin reinforced the sense that both sides were hedging rather than projecting a united front. When the 2026 results came—TVK as the single-largest party, the DMK routed and Stalin losing his own constituency—the Congress moved quickly into talks over possible support for a TVK government, signalling that its loyalty to the old alliance had limits.

Senior analyst Rasheed Kidwai, visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, places the INDIA bloc within the longer history of Indian coalition politics, and the comparison is not flattering. Alliances, he says, are historically formed around a clear objective: government formation. When that objective fails, they dissolve, even if their death is never formally announced. He draws parallels with the Janata experiment after the Emergency and the United Front governments under V. P. Singh, H. D. Deve Gowda and I. K. Gujral, all of which eventually fragmented without ceremony. “Alliances announce their birth, not their death,” he says. The INDIA bloc’s decline may never have a formal endpoint.

If the BJP has cracked the art of winning elections, the Opposition has not yet cracked the art of staying together long enough to contest one.

Fozia Yasin is senior associate editor with Outlook