While silence on communal matters may help opposition parties avoid immediate polarisation in favour of electoral dividends, it runs the risk of making them look redundant and irrelevant.
The change in Bihar is important because it demonstrates that the BJP can be checkmated; its manoeuvres against the Opposition, hailed by the media as masterstrokes and smart politics, regardless of its implications for democracy, can be thwarted.
India under its incumbent leadership is in the grips of an unprecedented variety of problems, but an alternate leadership and a transformative agenda for national renewal are nowhere in sight.
A short essay on the left opposition in the Bolshevik Party in Russia from 1919 to 1927, focusing mostly on the Democratic Centralists and the Workers Opposition.