230. That's how many MPs stood together on April 17 to vote down the Delimitation Bill - nearly the entire non-NDA bench, acting as one. As the Monsoon Session opens, with the DMK sitting apart, the TMC missing 20 of its 28 Lok Sabha MPs and the NCP weighing a merger with the NDA, the question is whether that number was ever really a coalition or just a single lucky moment of alignment.

The Opposition Is Weaker

• But Is That the Whole Story? The Monsoon Session opens on a very different Parliament from the one that adjourned after the Budget Session. In April, the Opposition looked formidable: 230 MPs, cutting across party lines, voted down the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill together. By July, that unity looks like an aberration rather than a pattern. The DMK has been ousted in Tamil Nadu and now sits apart from the rest of the INDIA bloc. The TMC is fighting off a rebellion by 20 of its own 28 Lok Sabha MPs. The NCP's Sharad Pawar faction is reportedly weighing a merger that could take it into the NDA.

Was This a Failure of Will or of Arithmetic?

One reading blames the Opposition itself - for treating April's Delimitation Bill victory as a solved problem rather than a foundation, for letting state-level rivalries (the DMK's frustration with Congress over Tamil Nadu, for instance) fester into open estrangement and for failing to build durable institutional mechanisms - a shared floor strategy, joint parliamentary committees, a standing coordination forum - before the electoral defeats hit.

On this reading, unity was available and squandered. The competing reading is less forgiving of that verdict. The DMK, TMC and NCP are not ideological allies who fell out - they are regional parties with genuinely different electorates, defeated on different issues, in different states, at different times.

Expecting them to present a single unified front after such asymmetric shocks may be asking Opposition politics to behave like something it structurally is not: a single party. The April unity was real, but it was also issue-specific - delimitation directly threatened the political weight of the states involved.

Asking for that same intensity on every issue misreads why it happened in the first place.

Where This Actually Matters

Both readings can be true at once and that is precisely the problem this Monsoon Session cannot avoid. Whatever its cause, a weakened Opposition arrives just as Parliament's scrutiny function is most needed - over the NEET-UG paper leak that cancelled a national exam, over alleged irregularities in Ram temple donations and over a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls that touches the basic question of citizenship.

Sonam Wangchuk's hunger strike at Jantar Mantar is, in effect, a protest against Parliament's absence from a conversation it should be leading. The honest position is that fragmentation is not fully the Opposition's fault, but it is fully its responsibility to manage.

A coalition of unequal, differently-wounded parties does not get a pass on democratic scrutiny because unity is hard - MPs, individually, still carry that duty regardless of what their alliance can or cannot agree on collectively.

The test of this session is not whether the DMK and TMC rediscover April's arithmetic. It is whether 543 individual MPs, however split, still choose to ask the government the questions it would rather not answer.