Maharashtra Congress leader and Union home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde may have shocked the nation by his seemingly absurd assertion that Coalgate will be forgotten after sometime as public memory is short. He, however, is not the only politician who harbours such a cynical view. When Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh extended his party’s support to the United Progressive Alliance government after the withdrawal of the Trinamool Congress on the plea of keeping the Bharatiya Janata Party out, he must have believed that people will forget that it was his refusal to support Congress president Sonia Gandhi after the 1999 Lok Sabha elections that paved the way for the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance to come to power at the Centre.
The fact is that despite his vociferous espousal of the project to revive the united front of non-BJP non-Congress parties, the canny politician from the Hindi heartland knows that the move is premature. So he has decided to buy time and support a political dispensation whose economic and political agenda he claims to dislike and oppose, not because there is an imminent threat of the return of the BJP to power but because regional parties that he hopes to rope in his imagined third front lack any common economic or social ideology. Most of these parties have their specified, localised areas of influence and a pre-poll alliance between them does not lead to accretion of electoral support to anyone. That a third front will emerge after the 2014 elections is, at least for the time being, merely a wishful thinking.
This is evident from the fact that there were sharp divergences in the stand taken by the non-BJP, non-Congress parties during the recent presidential elections. While Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal and J Jayalalithaa’s All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam supported the candidature of P A Sangma, Mulayam first joined hands with Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee to float the name of A P J Abdul Kalam before doing a turnaround to support the Congress-backed Pranab Mukherjee. The two parties stayed away from protests against foreign direct investment in retail that Mulayam tried to use to put up a semblance of joint action.
Whether such a unity of regional parties can emerge after 2014 elections remains to be seen. The political history of such initiatives is far from savoury. The V P Singh-led combination that came to power at the Centre in 1989 survived only for a short while on the crutches of both the Left parties and the BJP. The subsequent short-lived United Front governments headed by H D Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujaral had the Left as their friend, philosopher and guide and the Congress as it’s reluctant outside supporter. However, with the Left in terminal decline, the possibility of a third front today appears far from rosy.
While it is clear that neither of the so-called national parties, the Congress or the BJP, can hope to muster sufficient numbers on their own in the Lok Sabha in today’s circumstances, between themselves they occupy enough political space to deny the viability of a non-Congress, non-BJP combine in near future. Moreover, as the Left parties do not seem to be in a position to play the role of a pivot for such an initiative, at best such a grouping could be a motley crown of regional political satraps, each with his or her own political agenda.
With aspirants for the prime minister’s post blowing hot and cold on the possibility of a third front, CPI(M) politburo member Sitaram Yechury has said that the front is possible only by bringing in new set of policies and not just new set of politicians. Forging a common minimum programme of governance by bringing such desperate elements on one platform, under the circumstances, can only be a transient arrangement. Since its survival will depend on the mercy of either the Congress or the BJP, it cannot be a viable political alternative.
The weakening of the Congress and the BJP might give an impression that the objective conditions in contemporary Indian polity are favourable for the formation of a third front. However, subjective factors cannot be ignored. As the collapse of the Janata Party in 1979, the Janata Dal in 1990 and the amalgam of 13 parties called the United Front in the mid-1990s shows, conflicting egos and ambitions among leaders and pervading mutual mistrust will ensure that the third front remains inherently unstable.
The idea won’t go away because the Congress is shrinking across the country and the BJP is in no position to fill the space vacated by it. Moreover, having established their hegemony in their respective political fiefdoms, regional political satraps rightly want a greater say in determination of national priorities and policies. This explains the sense of urgency in Mulayam Singh Yadav’s efforts to reach out to leaders of non-BJP, non-Congress parties.
Since the third front remains an amorphous entity till the election results are out one can never be sure how it would shape up finally. The inner contradictions within regional political players cannot be discounted. For instance, Mamata Banerjee cannot join hands with anyone who stands besides the Left. Similarly, the SP-BSP and the AIADMK-DMK inner contradictions cannot be wiped out.
Then the leadership of the third front remains a crucial issue. At present Mulayam Singh Yadav may appear the front runner, but as earlier failed experiments have demonstrated, such issues are resolved through backdoor manipulations and the resolution, at best, is temporary. What is more alarming is that such fronts have in the past always thrown up week prime ministers and indecisive governments.
In this confusing scenario only one thing is certain — Mulayam Singh Yadav has a tough task ahead. Forging a third front and staying at the top of it will be one of the toughest challenges he faces in his political career. For while he is manipulating potential supports, others are not just smugly waiting, and they will not give in to him without extracting their pound of flesh.
Yogesh Vajpeyi is Consulting Editor, The New Indian Express.
E-mail: yogesh@newindianexpress.com
