About a fortnight ago, when senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid asserted that his party was still in the "best position" to clinch 120-130 seats in the next Lok Sabha elections in 2024, and assume the leadership of a prospective anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) opposition coalition, he set the cat among the pigeons. Since then, the gloves in the opposition camp seem to be slowly coming off and the chinks in the claims about their unity are showing more frequently, as the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Nationalist Congress Party headed by Sharad Pawar are having a dig at the Congress' perceived decline as a party with national footprints, and questioning its leadership credentials.

In an interview to the PTI, Khurshid, considered a staunch loyalist of the Congress first family (Sonia Gandhi, Rahul, and Priyanka), said: "If somebody is not a leader, why project them (as one)? If somebody is a leader, they will get projected on their own. Congress, among all opposition parties, is still in the best position to bring 120-130 seats." He also made it a point to drive home the fact that the Congress is in "direct contest" with the BJP in 240-250 Lok Sabha seats across India, and that prompted him to make the claim about the Congress spearheading the proposed opposition alliance. What is more interesting is that Khurshid said: "Any party with 100-120 seats will be the leader; any party with two seats won't be the leader. The answer to the leadership issue is 120 seats."

Khurshid's remarks are being viewed as an aggressive response to the TMC's "Mamata as PM" campaign, whose tempo is being raised in a calibrated manner in the build-up to the 2024 polls. It is not coincidence that almost a week after Khurshid's comments came a stinging counter from TMC National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee, Mamata's nephew, who said that his party would take on the BJP head on and, unlike many other parties, would "not sell its spine or hide in homes." Abhishek named the Congress in this context.

Picking up from where Abhishek had left off, the TMC's Bangla mouthpiece, the daily Jago Bangla, went much further on September 17, when it published a lead article bringing Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in the line of fire by alleging that he had failed to emerge as a credible alternative to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and only Mamata fitted in that role.

The daily quoted senior TMC leader Sudip Bandyopadhyay as telling a closed-door party meeting in Kolkata on September 15 that Rahul Gandhi had not succeeded in positioning himself as a challenger to Modi, despite several chances. According to Jago Bangla, the TMC will launch a campaign projecting Mamata as Modi's alternative. Adding grist to the "Mamata as PM" drive, Abhishek, during a campaign on September 18 for the Bhabanipur by-poll at the end of the month—in which Mamata is a candidate—said if there was anyone who could defeat the BJP in 2024, it's Mamata Banerjee.

As expected, the ticklish issue of opposition leadership is bedevilling it, despite Mamata's public proclamation after a meeting of 19 opposition parties with Sonia Gandhi that she was not interested in leading the opposition, and her suggestion that it was not the right time to discuss the issue, lest it revealed the divides in the opposition camp. It may be recalled that the TMC had scaled down the level of its representation at two separate meetings of opposition parties convened by Rahul Gandhi during the last monsoon session of parliament.

The TMC is not the only party to have questioned the Congress' claim to be the numero uno in the opposition camp. Sharad Pawar, whose party shares power with the Congress in Maharashtra, recently termed the Sonia-led party as "zamindars who cannot control their havelis." Abhishek, the TMC mouthpiece, and Pawar left little doubt about the two parties' continued discomfort with Rahul Gandhi and strong reservations about accepting his leadership.

Obviously, Abhishek's remarks or the Jago Bangla article did not go down well with the Congress. But while its top leadership was conspicuously silent regarding Abhishek's remarks, the party's West Bengal unit chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury did not hold back as he suggested the TMC could be playing into the hands of the BJP by targeting the Congress. "The TMC mouthpiece cannot decide whether Rahul Gandhi is eligible or not (to lead the opposition)," Adhir said. His senior Congress colleague in West Bengal Abdul Mannan said both Modi and the TMC were targeting Rahul Gandhi and wanted to know how sincere the TMC is about opposition unity. Senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sujan Chakraborty, too, echoed Adhir and Mannan by saying it was time to introspect who stands to benefit the most by thrusting the extremely controversial opposition leadership issue upfront at this juncture.

Political circles have noted the fact that the remarks made by Abhishek and the Jago Bangla article came at a time when efforts are on to try and forge opposition unity for the next parliamentary election. They also point to the TMC poaching a number of Congress leaders in Tripura and Assam into its own fold in a bid to push Mamata's national ambitions.

A greater section of the opposition parties is asking if the attacks on the Congress and Rahul Gandhi by Abhishek, Jago Bangla and Pawar, poaching into the Congress rank and file, and the projection of Mamata as the alternative to Modi, would in any way facilitate opposition unity. As it is, at least two regional parties—Aam Aadmi Party led by Arvind Kejriwal, and Bahujan Samaj Party of Mayawati—are so far out of the opposition unity attempts, and are often seen as soft towards the BJP. Mamata may have pitched for including the Congress in the joint opposition front and expanding it by bringing in more regional parties like Biju Janata Dal, YSR Congress Party, and Telangana Rashtra Samiti. But the problem is that the Congress is the principal rival for most of the regional parties in their respective states, whether it comes to state assembly or parliamentary polls.

On the other hand, what regional parties must realise is that parliamentary majority is a numbers game, pure and simple. Assuming that the Congress, as argued by Khurshid, were to manage 120 to 130 (out of a total of 535) Lok Sabha seats, there is no single regional party that can hope to come anywhere near that figure. It remains to be seen if the cumulative tally of Lok Sabha seats secured by the regional parties matches that of the grand old party. The first hurdle is the electoral arithmetic, and only then comes the issue of acceptability or non-acceptability of a leader as the face of a united opposition.

Apart from this, there is as yet no sign of the opposition parties hitting the streets against the Modi government on any issue, which ranges from fuel price hike to Pegasus spyware row to the farm laws, despite a decision taken on August 19 for state-level joint agitation. The decision came at a virtual meeting of the opposition parties led by Sonia Gandhi, that the protests should be held between September 20 and 30. Instead of going for the joint protests, what is visible is that the anti-BJP parties are each vying for a share of the political turf in the states. For instance, in Bhabanipur, Kolkata, the CPI(M) is challenging Mamata, and the Congress and the regional outfit Janata Dal (Secular) led by former prime minister HD Deve Gowda, are showing no signs of joining hands for the protests, which could be in danger of fizzling out.

Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent for The Daily Star. He writes from New Delhi, India.