Why did the BJP take the 'all-party' route on Op Sindoor delegations?

Is this a shift in political tactics or a maneuver to blunt domestic criticism?

During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent to power in 2014, one of his key slogans was the promise of a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ – an India that was ‘free’ of the Congress party. Over 11 years as prime minister, and particularly in Modi’s second term, the Bharatiya Janata Party has been more than willing to treat elected Opposition leaders as obstacles to governance, rather than legitimate representatives of the Indian public. Modi himself has accused the Congress of essentially being in lockstep with Pakistan.

“It is a coincidence, today Congress is getting weaker in India and as Congress is dying, Pakistan is crying,” Modi said in 2024. "Now Pakistani leaders are offering dua for Congress. Pakistan is eager to make 'Shehzaada' the Prime Minister and Congress is already Pakistan's fan. This partnership between Pakistan and Congress has now been completely exposed.”

Barely a year after those comments, it turned out to be a Congress leader – Shashi Tharoor – who received the most coverage as a member of a set of all-party delegations dispatched across the globe by Modi’s government in the hopes of overturning Pakistan’s ‘narrative victory’ following Operation Sindoor.

Coverage of the delegations (7 groups, with 59 members from across political parties, visiting 32 countries) that fanned out globally in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor has to some extent focused on what they actually achieved: Did they manage to make headlines in the local press? Did they convince leaders of other countries to reframe the conflict from ‘just another India-Pakistan skirmish’ to ‘India’s righteous efforts at combating terror’? Was this all mainly for domestic purposes? Did they meet senior leaders and have the chance to make India’s case?

(As V Sudarshan quipped, “Now that we have been told that Colombia has finally swung around to our side on Operation Sindoor after our delegation’s visit to Bogota, we can all sleep better.”)

Those are all important questions, which have received some attention elsewhere. But what does Tharoor’s prominence, as well as the fact that this was an ‘all-party’ effort tell us, from a domestic political standpoint? Why has a party that has dedicated itself to a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’, one that has always been willing to declare its political opponent as an ‘enemy’, one that treats Parliament as a rubber-stamp and Opposition MPs as hindrances, suddenly embraced cross-party solidarity and dipped into India’s long institutional history of relying on Parliamentarians for diplomacy (which, until now, the Modi government seemed to have judged a historical error)?

One answer is failure. Diplomatic, that is. There is a sense that despite India’s geopolitical heft, its deepening ties with partners around the world and its military success in the May clash, New Delhi struggled to make its case internationally – and was eclipsed by Pakistan.

As we discussed last week, this failure is partly¹ to do with the strategy built by the BJP over the last decade for political communications, which relies heavily on its ‘IT cell’ and obsequious TV networks to put out convenient narratives regardless of facts on the ground. This approach fell apart under international scrutiny and in circumstances where the targets were more diverse (global audiences), the narrative needed to be more nuanced (rather than the unrestrained jingoism and communalism that the BJP relies on domestically) and the environment was more dynamic (not just filled with India’s threatened and frequently feckless Opposition).

The delegations, in a sense, served as an acknowledgment of this communications debacle – and the government’s efforts at damage control.

Baked into this point was the implicit failure of two other elements of the BJP’s strategy, at least in combating Pakistani narratives: Hindu majoritarianism, as Sarayu Pani explained in the immediate aftermath of Operation Sindoor, and the deliberate conflation of Modi and the BJP with ‘India’. The delegations, by virtue of being cross-party and multi-religious, sought to obscure or even repudiate both of these, despite their centrality to the BJP project.

Another answer may well be that this was all aimed at a domestic audience. The BJP leans heavily on chest-thumping nationalism and, the combination of Pakistan’s communications strategy and US President Donald Trump’s undercutting of the Indian position, meant, as we also discussed last week, that the Modi government may have been uniquely vulnerable to domestic criticism (never mind the deeper questions about the security lapses that led to the Pahalgam attacks, the fact that the terrorists have yet to be apprehended, and the lives and materiel lost on the Indian side).

By insisting that Operation Sindoor is ‘not over’ and by corralling Opposition MPs into the delegations – including by choosing which leaders from the other side of the aisle it wants, rather than the ones put forward by the Opposition parties – the BJP attempted to maintain a grip over the issue and blunt political criticism by insisting on unity in the face of national security challenges. The prominence of Tharoor, in this reading, is less a symbol of cross-party solidarity than a deliberate BJP strategy to undercut its political rival (not helped by the Congress repeatedly taking the bait and squirming at his success).

If this were to be the case, it would only be deepening the error of the original IT Cell style communications strategy. Here is former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran:

“Domestic politics will influence foreign policy but foreign policy should not become a tool to be used in domestic politics. Diplomacy is outward-oriented. Its audience is the international community, including friends and adversaries alike. Inward-oriented diplomacy, seeking validation from a domestic audience, will undermine the pursuit of national interests.”

A third potential answer is that the 2024 elections actually changed the BJP. Having lost a simple majority and being forced to govern with the aid of coalition partners for the first time under Modi, the BJP is now returning to Parliamentary institutions and not just accepting but even encouraging the legitimacy of Opposition parties in India’s democratic processes. After all, the BJP didn’t rely on all-party delegations following the two previous conflicts with Pakistan (Uri & the surgical strikes in 2016; Pulwama and the Balakot skirmishes in 2019), nor after the clashes with Chinese soldiers in Ladakh in 2020.

The government’s endorsement of Opposition MPs appears to be the most genuine acknowledgment by the BJP of the legitimacy and, indeed, utility of parties and politicians that aren’t part of its coalition since at least the negotiations over the Goods & Services Tax Bill, early in Modi’s first term.

(There has been continued lip-service to the need for a strong Opposition and even a claim that ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’ doesn’t actually mean… what it means, even as actual cross-party institutions have been neglected and more than 140 Opposition MPs found themselves suspended on flimsy grounds in a 2023 Parliament session. Over the past decade, other ‘all-party’ efforts, like the reading down of Article 370 and the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill were classic Modi ‘shock and awe’ efforts, that didn’t involve any genuine consultation with the Opposition. All parties were invited to the inauguration of the new Parliament building in 2023, but a number of Opposition parties boycotted the event, claiming that Modi was turning it into a PR event, while discarding constitutional norms. Has there been an all or cross-party effort in the interim that I’ve missed?)

I’m not holding my breath for this last answer to the be the right one – not with recent remarks by Home Minister Amit Shah (“Under Operation Sindoor, we conducted a deep strike 100 kilometers into Pakistan, targeting their headquarters. Numerous terrorists were killed, but this seems to trouble Mamata Ji”, referring to the Chief Minister of West Bengal), or UP Chief Minister Adityanath. Yet, even if was narrowly motivated, the decision to involve leaders from across parties in a diplomatic effort that was then endorsed by the prime minister is an unambiguous positive for Indian democracy.

The government seemed to realised that the party’s old classics – Modi in fatigues, domestic dogwhistling etc – cannot win in the global information space. So it took a different, more inclusive approach at the international level, that is determinedly at odds with the way it operates domestically. Will these global waves lead to ripples back home as well?

Having endorsed Tharoor, Kanimozhi and Asaduddin Owaisi on the global stage, can the BJP continue to portray them or their parties (the Congress, the DMK and the AIMIM, respectively) as ‘anti-national’ without some amount of dissonance? Can the Opposition leaders turn their newfound Modi government endorsements into platforms that allow them to make other political points – including criticism of the BJP – without their patriotism being questioned?

The reflexive response is probably yes to the first question, and no to the second, not least because the BJP appears to be firmly in control of its political terrain, with the delegations at most being portrayed as the patriotism of individuals from the Opposition, rather than those broader political projects. Still, unconventional actions can have unexpected outcomes, and the change in the BJP’s approach towards international diplomacy may resonate in ways that we have yet to grasp.

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• Sarayu Pani on the delegations:

“The political compulsion felt by the opposition to perform in this seemingly fruitless public charade is interesting. It is unlikely that seasoned politicians in the opposition could not foresee this outcome. Their participation was therefore likely driven by what they imagine their own voters expect of them. These expectations are the product of a domestic public discourse where foreign policy has increasingly been taken out of the realm of political contestation and elevated to the realm of security, where the act of criticism is in itself seen as “anti-national”.”

• Nirupama Subramanian on the failure to isolate Pakistan:

“Caught flat-footed by the apparent return of the hyphen between India and Pakistan, New Delhi's first reaction was denial. So, even the ceasefire is not a ceasefire, but a ‘stoppage of firing’. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself declared that the operation had not ended. India had only agreed, at Pakistan's request, he said, to a “pause”.

The second reaction was to send out all-party delegations across the world to spread the word about Pakistan's use of terrorism as an instrument to achieve strategic goals in the region. While what the delegations achieved is not clear, the government has clearly been more successful in the other unstated aims of these missions, such as blunting criticism by the opposition parties at home, and unsettling the Congress by seeming to detach Shashi Tharoor from the party.”

• Bharat Bhushan on the Opposition’s lack of coordination:

“If everyone — especially MPs cutting across political lines — is standing behind the government’s narrative, then what will the special session of Parliament or a discussion on the Pahalgam tragedy and Operation Sindoor achieve? The Opposition will have already become a stakeholder in the official narrative of the government. As a consequence, its leverage in Parliament to question the Modi government’s strategy and political messaging through Operation Sindoor will diminish.

How far the Opposition can overcome this self-inflicted wound and be able to convey to the public that its support for the government’s foreign policy is distinct from critiquing the government for domestic accountability, remains uncertain.

Modi who was on the backfoot globally (for military aggressiveness) and domestically among his supporters (ironically for not being aggressive enough), will have diverted the public narrative. This may prevent close scrutiny of Operation Sindoor by Parliament as well as the path his government has embarked on through its new doctrine against terrorism.”

• Suhasini Haidar on whether the delegations were a success.

• At a more macro level, Studies in Indian Politics has a special issue on Theorizing Indian Foreign Policy, curated by Siddharth Mallavarapu, including Nicolas Blarel on The Domestic-International Nexus in Indian Foreign Policymaking, Ian Hall on the Jaishankar Doctrine and Medha on an Alternative Foreign Policy Imaginary for India.

1. Diplomacy also has a role here, not just comms.