It’s no longer ‘unity in struggle’ but ‘struggle for unity’. The first has the feel of a lapsed slogan from a long-gone age, the second represents the new upper ceiling of ambition for India’s opposition. At a time when the BJP army’s hoof marks are tracing an ever-larger map, evoking the kind of awe a Mongol horde may have done once, what is a dispirited opposition to do? Well, with the inevitability of defeat almost cast in stone, they have opted to use the occasion as a mock exam, a laboratory from which something useful for the future may perchance emerge. From their scattered pockets of resistance, they are talking to each other, negotiating, working on a prototype for a united alternative front.