In the No Confidence Motion (NCM) voting, every party in opposition was fooling the other one and the Congress was being fooled by everyone. The BJP sailed through the NCM waters elegantly by scoring 325 out of 451 against 126 of the opposition. There were only 451 members present in Lok Sabha when the voting took place after some funny and some tedious moments in the 12-hour-long debate. The NDA needed only 226 votes to prove its majority in the house but it scored 325 which is more than two third of the total votes. These numbers tell us that it was a great victory for NDA and a humiliating defeat for the opposition.
If we break-up the numbers some interesting facts come out of it. The total strength of NDA is 315 in the Lok Sabha and if we substitute the 18 seats of Shiv Sena (SS), which abstained from voting then the strength goes down to 297. Now, as per the statement of BJP leader Ananth Kumar Geethe, the AIADMK voted for NDA government in NCM. So, if we add up 37 seats of AIADMK the numbers in support of government goes up to 334 (333 excluding speaker) of which it got 325. Some legislators from the government may have abstained from voting or did not show up because it was not going to affect the results anyway.
Now, if we crunch the opposition numbers, the opposition comes out as a disorganized entity. The BJD of Naveen Patnaik with 19 seats and TRS of KCR with 11 seats abstained from the voting. Still the Congress 48, TMC 34, TDP 16, CPM 9, NCP 7, SP 7, AAP 4, RJD 4, AIUDF 3, INLD 2, IUML 2, JMM 2, AIMIM 1, AINRC 1, CPI 1, NC 1, JDS 1, RLD 1, RSP 1 were expected to support the No Confidence Motion. If we add up the numbers, it goes to 145 but the tragedy is that only 126 votes were in support of the No Confidence Motion.
The gap of 19 seats throws up some serious questions about which parties betrayed the opposition or which party MPs backstabbed their own parties. Was it Samajwadi Party (SP) which turned the table which is typical to its characteristic? Previously in 2008, it did the same on the Indo-US nuclear deal. So they are the prime suspect but they have only 7 seats. The gap is of 19 seats which tell us that there must be some other parties which did not show up. Was it NCP? It makes a usual suspect because the leader of the party Sharad Pawar keeps mingling with Prime Minister and many times he has praised him too. Another suspect is TMC which despite its vehement opposition to BJP does not like Congress too because they allied with the Communist party in West Bengal to defeat Mamata Banerjee. So, it is possible that some of the TMC MPs abstained from the No Confidence Motion and some voted in favor of it. Some other parties which supported the NCM their MPs might have not supported the idea and because no party issued a whip so it is possible that MPs did not show up despite the party support.
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Whichever parties did not show up, one thing is clear from the abstention of 83 MPs that the idea of united opposition does not carry weight at all. So, the Congress, which is daydreaming that a united opposition will stand behind it, needs to understand that it has to challenge the mighty Modi-Shah duo alone. They could trust no one because no one trusts them. The Congress party must understand this simple fact.
