Are the strains of a long wait for an alternative government in Lucknow beginning to show? In a swift manoeuvre, the Third Front, comprising Ajit Singh’s RLD, JD(S), Sharad Pawar’s NCP), Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janashakti Party and the Samajwadi Janata Party (SJP) have come together to fight the Delhi Assembly election slated for November, 2003. The Front will fight all 70 Assembly seats in the Capital and is opposed to both the Congress and the BJP. It was only last week that former Agriculture minister and RLD chief Ajit Singh became the catalyst for forging a grand alliance among Opposition parties in UP which included the Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Kalyan Singh’s LKP. BJP mulls expansion to save Maya govt Lucknow: The UP unit of BJP has found a way to keep its flock together in the wake of Opposition’s attempts to topple the Mayawati government. The party has dangled the ministry expansion carrot before its legislators to check the Opposition’s moves to effect a split in the ruling coalition. ‘‘The ministry expansion will take place after my Jagran Yatra ends on June 18. There is possibility that new faces will be inducted but there is no threat to the Mayawati government,’’ said UP BJP chief Vinay Katiyar. With a new alliance born in the state after the withdrawal of support by RLD MLAs and Congress and Samajwadi Party warming up to each other, the BJP leadership has no other option but to give the impression that a Cabinet expansion is on its way. Trying hard to look unruffled, Katiyar said: ‘‘There is no threat to the government or BJP. The Opposition has come together not to topple the Mayawati government but to check the BJP-BSP coalition from capturing a lion’s share in the Lok Sabha polls. And the Congress is warming up to the SP with an eye on the Lok Sabha polls.’’ Amit Sharma Singh and his 14-member legislature party had pulled out of the Union Cabinet and CM Mayawati’s coalition government respectively, which had set the cat among the pigeons. However, more than a week later, there are still no signs of an alternative government in place as the combined Opposition parties do not add up to the magic number to cross the halfway mark for a majority in the House. So far, they can claim only 191 MLAs in the House of 204 while Mayawati still enjoys the support of a majority of 212 MLAs. The rest are Independents. Despite Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s public admission in Srinagar over the weekend that her party was open to a ‘‘possible tie-up’’ with the SP in UP and a broad-based alliance at the Centre, the party does not seem to be in a hurry to do so. In fact, sources say, the Congress seems to want to tie up with like-minded small political groupings individually in each state rather than have an alliance with the Third Front as a whole. For, in the event of the latter, the party would be at the mercy of the Front when it comes to government formation both in the states and at the Centre. The first opportunity for this experiment of Opposition unity in a state came in Uttar Pradesh when the RLD pulled out but any plans of extending this alliance beyond the state to regions like Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, or even Delhi came to naught, as UP had to be settled first. The future of Opposition alliances hinged on how the political equations in UP worked out but, with the Mayawati government looking far from shaky and with murmurs of a reluctant Congress stalling the toppling game in Lucknow, some Opposition parties seem to have seized the day by going ahead with an anti-Congress front in Delhi. The pressure is on for some swift action in UP. According to sources, the Third Front will launch its election campaign on July 1 and four former PMs — V.P. Singh, I.K. Gujral, H.D. Deve Gowda and Chandrashekhar — will address the rally.
