00:00Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar's decision to leave the opposition alliance and go back
00:08to the BJP, well, that was clearly political opportunism. He did it to save his kursi or
00:14his chair as they say, and much has been written about that. But the fact also is that it's
00:18yet another sign of just how fragile the opposition grouping is, and it looks like really it's
00:25coming apart at the seams. For one, Nitish Kumar was the architect of the India alliance.
00:30He's the one who took the initiative to bring all opposition parties together. Today, he's
00:34not part of the grouping at all. Secondly, as a prominent chief minister of a Hindi heartland
00:40state, he was an important voice for the opposition to have in their camp. Also somebody who was
00:45pitching very strongly for a caste census, not just in Bihar, but nationally. This is
00:50issue that the opposition has been hoping to really play up in the general election.
00:55But it is, as I said, yet another sign of just how bad things are in the opposition camp.
01:01The DMC and the Congress have been bickering, have been at each other's throats very publicly
01:05almost every day. Mamata has said she'd fight the Lok Sabha elections alone. The AAP has said
01:11it's not going to go for an alliance with the Congress in Punjab. Meanwhile, their seat-sharing
01:16talks that the Congress had with the Samajwadi party in UP, they don't seem to have gone anywhere
01:21with the SP announcing on its own that it's giving only 11 seats to the Congress out of 18 in UP.
01:28And then also announcing its first list of 16 candidates for the parliament elections.
01:32So all of this shows just how much of a disarray the opposition camp is in. And they're really
01:38also not able to structure an effective narrative to counter Modi and the BJP.
01:43It's clearly trouble ahead for them. We are literally weeks away from the general election
01:48and the opposition camp is still struggling to find its feet.
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