‘Unite to fight’: Uddhav Sena to Kejriwal, Stalin; will AAP, DMK relent?

Both AAP and DMK have exited the INDIA bloc.

NEW DELHI: Should Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP and MK Stalin’s DMK join INDIA bloc’s fight against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over SIR? Well, the answer would surely be “yes”, as far as the allies of the bloc are concerned.Now to the more difficult question: Will Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP and MK Stalin’s DMK join INDIA bloc’s fight against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over SIR? Well, there is no straight answer to this one.The AAP and the DMK have a common enemy in the Congress. Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) has now urged the two parties to set aside their differences with the grand-old-party to fight against “dictatorship”. In an editorial in the party mouthpiece ‘Saamana’, Shiv Sena (UBT) said, “The entire country has been witnessing protests against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), but the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) have stayed away from it.”

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The absence of both parties, who have officially withdrawn from the INDIA bloc, has highlighted the existing differences within the opposition camp on the strategy and format of the protest against irregularities in the SIR process.

‘A very critical request’

Former Congress leader and senior political commentator Sanjay Jha feels Shiv Sena (UBT)’s suggestion to both the DMK and the Aam Aadmi Party to join the INDIA bloc is a very practical, very reasonable, and at the moment, a very critical request.“This is not about, at the moment, anything other than the fact that Indian democracy is in peril. It is unlikely that the CEC is going to resign of his own volition. It is pretty apparent that the government of Mr. Modi is going to be stubborn, and they will stonewall any effort by the opposition to demand and get accountability. Public protests don’t seem to make any difference to the government. So the more the merrier,” Sanjay Jha says.While the AAP has openly announced it will not be a part of the INDIA bloc’s protest and said “we are fighting this battle in our own way, the DMK has spoken in different tones.DMK spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai accused Rahul of adopting inconsistent positions on the electoral roll revision exercise and questioned why developments in Tamil Nadu had not received the same attention as the broader campaign against the Election Commission.In a post on X, Annadurai called on Rahul Gandhi to clarify his stand on allegations concerning names allegedly removed from Tamil Nadu’s electoral rolls during the SIR process.The DMK spokesperson also referred to a statement attributed to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge that governments elected after the SIR exercise should be dissolved and sought clarification on why Rahul Gandhi had not publicly endorsed that position and whether such a stand would also apply to Tamil Nadu.Interestingly, a day later, DMK senior leader TKS Elangovan backed Rahul Gandhi on protests against the Election Commission (EC), saying that citizens have a right to protest against the government.“It is the right of citizens to fight against the government’s wrongdoings. That is what Rahul Gandhi did yesterday. Still, this government does not want him to protest because Gyanesh Kumar is being very useful to the BJP. Because of him, the BJP captured power in many states. In all these states, re-elections should be held,” Elangovan said.

Will DMK, AAP join SIR protests?

The DMK and the Congress had a very unpleasant parting of their two-decade-old ties after the 2026 assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, which the alliance lost to actor-politician C Joseph Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam TVK. While the TVK emerged as the single largest party, it fell short of a majority. The Congress rushed in to help Vijay not just form the government but also eventually join it. Making Congress a part of the government was something the DMK had resisted all along. The Congress move offended the DMK to no end. Since then, MK Stalin’s party has been unrelenting in its attacks on the Congress at all forums from Chennai to Delhi. The Congress, on its part, maintains that it kept the DMK in the loop while shifting loyalties to the TVK.The DMK is missing no opportunity to drive a wedge between the new allies. On Thursday, it lashed out at Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay-led TVK for not explicitly naming the BJP government over the arrest of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi after a protest in the national capital demanding the resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar.Questioning the TVK’s statement, Elangovan pointed out that it failed to identify the authorities responsible for the action against the leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha. “Who arrested Rahul Gandhi? They should condemn and explicitly mention the name of the BJP government,” Elangovan told PTI videos.With the TVK establishing itself as the third pole of Tamil Nadu politics, at least for now, the Congress will have to choose one against the other, and to that extent its ties with the DMK will remain frosty for now. More so, after the TVK has officially joined the INDIA bloc. But the DMK’s measured criticism of the Congress-led INDIA bloc protests may offer a ray of hope to the opposition bloc allies of a future softening of stand by M K Stalin.Now, let’s turn to AAP. Here’s where untangling the strains in the ties may be very difficult, if not impossible. Relations between the Congress and the AAP have always been uneasy and tumultuous. AAP was initially a part of the INDIA bloc.However, ties between Kejriwal’s party and the Congress were never smooth given their competing political interests in several states. AAP attended the first three meetings of the INDIA bloc. The high point in their ties came in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections when the two parties agreed to a joint contest in Delhi, Haryana, Goa, Punjab and Gujarat.The alliance did not work and the ties ended for all practical purposes after the results were out. In July 2025, Kejriwal formally announced the end of ties.Uddhav Thackeray’s party has reminded Kejriwal of his bitter experiences with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union home minister Amit Shah and the Election Commission.“While Kejriwal was the chief minister of Delhi, he was put behind bars in a “false” case. Kejriwal’s defeat was engineered by deleting names of voters from his constituency, it alleged. So, it is not in the AAP’s interest to stay away from the INDIA bloc,” the Shiv Sena (UBT) wrote in its editorial.

‘All parties should look at larger picture’

Sanjay Jha is confident that these parties will eventually join the opposition protest. He argues it is extremely crucial that the opposition includes everyone.“Whether there are any small, petty differences, whether there is any degree of discomfort with one or the other partner, everyone has to look at the larger picture. And the larger picture is that today people are out on the streets because they’re concerned about the future of their vote and the future of democracy,” Sanjay Jha says.

“And I believe it is very likely that the DMK and Arvind Kejriwal will join, because this is the time to put aside any petty squabbles and think of the larger goal of the country,” he adds.But this may be easier said than done. The Congress and the AAP are the main rivals in Punjab, where assembly elections are due early next year. The two parties are already engaged in a bitter war of words in Punjab, where AAP is defending its only government and the Congress is going all out to defeat Kejriwal’s party and reclaim its lost glory and government in the state.So, let’s see if this political compulsion decides the future course of ties between the two parties or the “larger goal of the country”?