The once-vaunted claimant to power — the amoeboid multi-party coalition that called itself INDIA — has been buried quite unmourned just where it was born a year and a half or so ago. Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD casually pronounced its demise in a solitary rite in Patna on Wednesday. There’s no record of anyone shedding tears.

On the contrary, the mood among some constituents would suggest they would rather have INDIA’s death certified. “Wind it up,” is what Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah prescribed for a league of which he himself was — or is, who knows yet? — a part. “It has no leader, it has no meetings, it doesn’t seem to be working, let’s call it off and move on.”

Images were released around the same time of Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, and among the chief actors of INDIA, mulling how to “shake up the legacy of a 100-year brand” at a popular milk-shake store in Delhi. INDIA, or its unravelling, appeared a remote concern, if that.

The irony must remain that the grand host of the first INDIA jamboree in Patna in June of 2023 — Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar — was the first to deliver a parting kick to what would forever resemble a ramshackle enterprise, loose at multiple hinges.

It took the better part of two days at the second melee of potential partners down in Bengaluru for them to agree to call themselves INDIA — Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance.

They also resolved, in Bengaluru, to institute a secretariat in Delhi to coordinate the affairs of the conglomerate. That secretariat was never set up. It was only logical that members of that secretariat never came to be named. Neither was it ever known who made up the core group that would be INDIA’s engine. Choices for key jobs may have been discussed among leaders — or some leaders — but nobody ever came to be named. What followed was the consequence of such a disowned preface.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, which the INDIA parties framed as a “fight between the BJP and the rest of the country”, leaders of the member parties — 26 in all to begin with — did not once take the stage together to blow the bugle for battle. The alliance was never meant to work in the LDF-UDF bipolarity of Kerala, but it never remotely promised to work in Bengal where Mamata Banerjee pronounced early that she was the empress of her realm, INDIA be gone.

In Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference was able to pull aside the Congress with ease before it shut the door on Mehbooba Mufti’s PDP. In heartland states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the joint effort could have been far more robust than it eventually turned out to be.

Ask Akhilesh Yadav and he would probably admit INDIA could have done even better had his Samajwadi Party been given greater say in ticket distribution. Ask Tejashwi Yadav and he’d probably tell you that the RJD gave away far too many seats to the Congress than it deserved. In Maharashtra, where INDIA did better the NDA, the seeds of fracture and disruption had been so sown that they would dislodge the INDIA parties in the ensuing Assembly polls.

Even so, if the INDIA effort had reason to be pleased it had Narendra Modi’s BJP short of a majority in the Lok Sabha and forced him to lean on significant allies like N. Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar, it was unable to carry off the cheer.

To begin with, it wallowed excessively and far too exultantly in the inroads it had made; thereafter, it seemed to lose the energy and the will to consolidate the gains and push on. As a group, it capitulated instead. They — the Congress in the main — have taken blow after blow in major battlegrounds since. Haryana was given away almost against the run of play. Maharashtra was as much a symptom of the lack of self-belief in the Aghadi coalition as of the will of the NDA to keep its grip on power.

In the aftermath of such reverses — and the palpable reluctance of the Congress to even convene a conference for corrections — INDIA has likely been rendered an untenable prospect. Leave alone rivals on the team like AAP’s Arvind Kejriwal, even the likes of Lalu Prasad, arguably a fond ally of the Congress and Rahul Gandhi, have called for change at the top — off with Rahul, Lalu appeared to suggest the other day, bring on Mamata as head.

His son, Tejashwi, has now brought attention to the hard truth that there might be nothing for Mamata to become head of other than the Trinamool Congress. He pronounced INDIA six feet under on Wednesday; Omar said on Thursday let’s get it over with now.