Small is powerful

It would be easy to dismiss the periodic talk of a third front, as yet another example of the incoherent and overweening ambitions of a motley group of politicians.

It would be easy to dismiss the periodic talk of a third front, as yet another example of the incoherent and overweening ambitions of a motley group of politicians. On the most charitable interpretation it is whimsical kite flying; at worst it is destructive power play. Making the third front a viable option seems like a long shot. The possibility that a coalition without the Congress or the BJP could cross the 270-seat mark in the Lok Sabha seems difficult to imagine. The idea that a coalition with a huge number of leaders potentially undercutting each other, without any ideology to hold them together, without any leaders who have the requisite authority to hold an unwieldy alliance together, with no track record of national-level governance, could even emerge as a serious electoral force seems far fetched. India8217;s experience with the politics of alternatives doesn8217;t inspire confidence. They have worked briefly, under exceptional circumstances when there was a consensus to keep one of the major parties out of power. But they have been short-lived, and the numbers game militates against keeping both the BJP and the Congress out.

Yet for all the formidable political obstacles to the third front, it would be foolish to dismiss what the talk about it represents. For one thing, it is an indication of the growing vacuum in Indian politics. In the 2004 elections both the national parties could together only manage less than 50 per cent of the vote. An alternative may not be in sight, but it is difficult to argue that the Congress and the BJP, taken together, command support of even half the country. And it is a distinct possibility that their combined hold over the national imagination decreases even further. Whether a third front emerges or not is an open question: fronts number one and two are losing credibility.

But there is a sense in which, while the third front is not a political reality understood in narrow electoral terms, it is already operating as a third force in Indian politics in the following sense. First, it has to be said that barring episodic moments of Hindutva, not a single ideological current that has defined Indian politics during the last 20 years has come from the major political parties. The third front may not be an electoral reality, but its individual constituents have exercised more influence in shaping Indian politics.

The first of these currents is the rise of the OBCs as a political class. Whatever one may think of a Mulayam or a Lalu, they have made OBC assertion an irrevocable part of Indian politics: it sets vetoes on the design of sensible affirmative action policy, and directs agricultural policy in the interests of large farmers. The Congress and the BJP meekly and tamely play along with OBC politics, with neither the strength to master it, nor the courage to resist it.

The second big current in Indian politics was its greater regionalisation, both in a negative and positive sense. It took the rise of regional parties, from the TDP to the Tamil parties, to resist the forces of political centralisation. This regionalisation has been successful to a point where the idea of a national party seems a misnomer.

It has to be said that after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the politics of what counts as secularism has largely been defined by the likes of Mulayam and the Left. Their politics may be dismissed as vote bank politics, but the truth is that the Congress has had to internalise their agenda rather than resist it. Again, one can disagree vehemently with the Left8217;s foreign policy and its contorted hypocrisies. But the blunt truth is that the language of a foreign policy that has any space for resisting the hegemony of dominant powers, and taps into a deeper strain of India8217;s national identity, has also migrated outside the BJP and the Congress. The idea of expanding the state without reforming it, as the UPA has done, is as Left an idea as one can imagine. And the BSP of course represents an empowering of dalits as agents in their own right in a way that the Congress never could.

In short, ideologically speaking, political parties outside the BJP and the Congress have far more influence than mainstream national parties. Taken together these parties represent five tendencies: caste empowerment, regionalisation, expansion of state power without reform, elements of an anti-imperial foreign policy and the production of genuine grassroots leaders. These elements can be harmonised to a certain degree with liberalisation and integration into the world economy; and in so far as it can, these parties have embraced it. All this doesn8217;t add up to a coherent ideology or party, but it does make for a political momentum that is not easy to circumvent.

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Both the BJP and the Congress have not faced up to three challenges. They have stopped being vehicles for empowering new constituencies, their leaderships have a crisis of credibility in their own right, and they cannot translate their policy narrative into a coherent counter to the tendencies that members of the third front represent. They don8217;t have an identity to press against this proliferation of identities. The third front may be nothing more than a collection of veto points, with each small party flexing muscle on its favourite agenda. But by the same token the national parties are also hollow shells, mere place holders without a core. Both the BJP and the Congress are also embarrassed by the one thing they have by turns helped India to move towards: a new vision of an economically liberalised India. And both have failed to tie it to a political and organisational strategy.

If viewed from this perspective, India8217;s politics looks different. It is often said that there is no alternative to the Congress and the BJP. In fact the reality is the other way round. The Congress and the BJP have placed themselves in a position where they have no option but to follow this 8220;third force8221;. When the Congress begins to thank the SP for halting the growth of the BJP and makes overtures towards an alliance with it, as it did in Kanpur on Sunday, you know the third front has already triumphed. Whether talk of the third front shows Prakash Karat8217;s overreaching ambition to put even more pressure on the UPA or various regional parties8217; attempts to blackmail the BJP and the Congress into giving them a better deal is immaterial. In ideological terms the seemingly elusive third front is, alas, the more robust reality of Indian politics. We are already being ruled by it.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research pratapbmehtagmail.com