Opinion Back to third
A Modi-led BJP and a drained Congress set the stage for the return of a familiar political actor.
A Modi-led BJP and a drained Congress set the stage for the return of a familiar political actor.
A day after it stitched a pact with the CPI, J. Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK has tied up with the CPM for the Lok Sabha polls, and an older question has returned to tantalise. Could this be the beginning of a regrouping of the Third Front? The AIADMK’s decision must be seen alongside Nitish Kumar’s exertions to put together a non-Congress and non-BJP grouping ahead of the parliamentary polls, and both developments were preceded by the so-called convention against communalism held in the shadow of the Muzaffarnagar violence by several regional parties and the Left in Delhi last October.
So far, these political moves — in Delhi or Chennai — have been accompanied by disavowals of a more encompassing alliance. Yet, as these parties get ready to synchronise their floor strategies in the parliamentary session that begins this week, a strong suspicion of a born-again Third Front is in the air.
It was only to be expected that the national ambitions of non-Congress and non-BJP players, many of them self-assured and sure-footed in their own states, should be stoked. After all, this political moment is made up of a beseiged Congress that is widely seen to be unable to hold up its end of the political contest. On the other side, the Narendra Modi-led BJP has made little effort towards, and had scarce success in, making itself attractive to new allies.
An inviting space on the national stage seems to have opened up for smaller regional players. In the foreseeable future, this new political dynamic, fuelled by the BJP’s takeover by a forceful but polarising leader and the Congress’s unchecked shrinking, could even disrupt the story of the inexorable firming up of a tidy two-alliance system led by the Congress and BJP in the national polity.
But the old incoherences still apply. In its new avatar, the Third Front would still have too many prime ministerial candidates and disparate agendas, it would lack a centrepiece idea or party, and be rife with internal contradictions and blood feuds. For all their protestations of non-BJPism and non-Congressism, Third Front governments have never been able to stand without the support of either the Congress or BJP. They have also proved to be notoriously shortlived.
There is no reason to believe that these problems have been conquered and an awareness of this may be why the new front-to-be hesitates to call itself by its name. Yet, as regional parties start coming together to take on the challenge that Modi has thrown, one that the Congress seems unable to rouse itself to meet, and with the AAP also trying to stake out an independent national foothold meanwhile, the political contest will only get more riveting.
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