Muddle Manch

There was a closed-door meeting on Monday between a bunch of leaders who have nothing in common but their antipathies and talk of a Third Front is once again in the air. A sad denouement, some would say, for an idea once touted to nurture political alternatives at the Centre to the Congress and BJP. So what if it was untidy, and if it bristled with more prime minister wannabes than any formation could realistically placate. The Third Front was going to be the large-hearted homing ground for all the political forces that had been set free by the splintering of the decaying Congress system. It would enliven and deepen our politics, it was said. The incipient stirrings of the Rashtriya Swabhiman Manch, starring George Fernandes and other Sonia-baiters, is a reality check.

But then, it didn’t really need the unbelievable slightness of the agenda of the old-new Manch to tell us that the Third Front has always been an idea whose time never comes. That romantic upsurge from below, fiercely independent of the Big Two, which would throw up issues they had kept off the national stage, never happened. The Third Front has never been independent in practice of either the Congress or BJP, for one. While defining itself as anti-Congress, it solicited the party’s ‘‘outside’’ support to form governments at the Centre. The Janata Dal was actually instrumental in the BJP’s expansion into new geographical areas through alliances that had more to do with opportunism than ideology or principle. Always keeping their eye on the main chance, leaders of the Third Front never took time out to frame an agenda that could link the politics of its many constituents in any meaningful manner. Its most glaring failure, of course, has been its incoherence on the economic front. But even on ‘‘social justice’’, or centre-state relations — issues on which the regional and caste-based outfits could arguably contribute to the national debate — they frittered away the chance to forge the larger and inclusive programme.

The latest move to rally together the erstwhile Janata Parivar may be destined to even more meaninglessness at a time when even the Congress has realised the importance of being coalitionable. The last election saw the emergence of a two-coalition system led by the two big parties. The idea of the Third Front has a more unsure toehold today than it ever did.