This is a season of alliances, and the season of foes turned friends and friends becoming distant. Days after the BJP and BJD announced that they would go their separate ways in Odisha, today the BJP drew the curtains on its talks with its oldest alliance partner, the Akali Dal, a party that left the NDA in 2020 because of disagreements over farm laws. In the run-up to 2024, even as the opposition India bloc struggled to keep its constituents together, the BJP has seen mixed success. With the JDS, TDP, PML, and JDU coming back but AIADMK, Akali Dal, and BJD playing tough, or is the BJP applying a dominant matrix here? Raj Thackeray's MNS, we are told, is still a work in progress. Are regional parties trying to survive and not get subsumed? Does the BJP's expansionist aspirations also reflect in its alliance-making?