Such a dismal front

The Third Front idea has been revived because a vacuum the size of a new national party has formed in the political sphere. Our two main political parties are in the dumps. Congress is reeling with the shock of electoral defeats in our northern states and the BJP, which got a strut back in its stride after successes in Punjab and Uttarakhand, has lost it since Mayawati took Uttar Pradesh. The Congress was not expecting much in Uttar Pradesh so it was disappointed but not defeated. For the BJP, the emergence of Mayawati as the undisputed leader of our largest state has come as a huge shock. Since polls predicted that they would do so well, it encouraged them to show their ugliest, hate-filled colours.

As things stand, there is little chance that either Congress or BJP will recover enough to be in a position to choose our next prime minister. This privilege is likely to go to someone like Mayawati, who will have no compunctions about keeping the job for herself as she has indicated in every interview she has given since becoming chief minister. And, why not?

Meanwhile, am I the only one puzzled by the absence of anyone trying to create a new national party before the next general election? A party that would stand for the reduction of the role of the state and for policies that would support the entrepreneurs who have saved India from becoming an economic basket case. High growth rates are not because the public sector is suddenly doing brilliantly but because the private sector is booming.

We need a political party that will stand for policies that allow private participation even in areas that should be the territory of the state. There has been such abysmal failure here that every political party is forced to accept quotas in jobs and education as the only way to help the underprivileged. It is a flawed idea and a dangerous one as we saw recently in Rajasthan.

The better way would be for us to adopt policies that would increase the size of the Indian cake. In education and healthcare if government cannot invest our money wisely it must allow private enterprise to enter and build the hundreds of thousands of schools, colleges and hospitals that India cannot afford any more to do without. In agriculture if all it can come up with is yet another nebulous package, of the kind the prime minister

announced recently, then we really need a political party that will promise to support capitalist farming.

The size of farms has to be allowed to grow big enough for them to become profitable. This would be the opposite of land reform and the fragmentation it brought. The dependence of more than 60 per cent of Indians on subsistence farming also needs to be gradually changed.

This can be done if we allow massive doses of private investment into the rural economy to build the cold storages and air-conditioned supply chains we need if nearly half of what our farmers produce is to stop being allowed to rot every year. Food processing and other agri-industries will create the new rural jobs that we so badly need.

These ideas will get the support of voters if they can be certain that their lives will improve. But, to articulate this total shift away from the policies we have followed so far we need a new political party. A post-modern version of the old Swatantra Party if you will. A party that will have the courage to admit why our socialist policies have failed and articulate what needs to be done for ordinary Indians to share the benefits of an economy that is supposedly the second fastest growing economy in the world.

What we do not need is a revival of a Third Front that stands for the very socialist ideas that we should have junked long ago.