:: Jayanthi Natrajan

Third Front cannot be game-changers

Jayanthi Natarajan

March.16 : The Third Front, which likes to be called an alternative front, is a rather amorphous and loose conglomeration of parties which come together like a chimera at the time of elections and vanish as rapidly when the election mandate makes it clear that their support and vote percentage in national politics is far too limited to play any meaningful role. The reason for the sudden flurry of attention that has come their way is actually due more to the desire of the mainstream media, both electronic and print, to improve TRPs rather than any real and substantive political significance.

At the national level, our polity has became more or less bipolar, and it is a demonstrable fact that sustainable and stable governments at the Centre can be formed only with a pivotal presence of a national party like the Congress. Without such a cementing party, the loose aggregation of disparate parties is bound to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. This has been witnessed on every occasion that a non-Congress or non-BJP government has come to power, powered only on the fuel of non-Congressism and a desire for power. Fourteen Lok Sabha elections have taken place since Independence, and for 45 years of this period, the people of India have given the Congress a clear majority. Those Congress governments were stable. In 1977, the Janata Party emerged with a majority but quickly collapsed. In 1989, although the Congress emerged as the single largest party, Rajiv Gandhi preferred to sit in Opposition and V.P. Singh became Prime Minister, supported by a bizarre combination of the BJP on one side and the Left on the other. Naturally, it did not last more than 11 months. The Chandra Shekhar government did not last even six months and the country went in for general elections. Again, in 1996, a coalition government was formed by H.D. Deve Gowda, and later by I.K. Gujral. Once again, general elections followed and the BJP formed the government, after which the NDA lasted its full term.

Quite simply, the vote percentage has been 26.53 per cent for the Congress and 22.16 per cent for the BJP in the 2004 elections. The CPI(M), with its best-ever performance of 43 seats, obtained only 5.66 per cent of the national vote, while the CPI notched up 1.41 per cent. It would be pertinent to point out that the Left cannot possibly sustain this performance in the forthcoming elections, and their seats and vote percentage are bound to come down. The other two national parties — the BSP and the NCP — also received around six per cent of the vote. The remaining champions of the so-called Third Front obtained 3.04 per cent (TDP), 1.47 (JD-S), 2.19 (AIADMK), 5.3 (BSP), 0.63 (TRS) and 0.43 per cent (MDMK).

All prominent Third Front promoters add up only to 13.06 per cent of the national vote in terms of the 2004 general elections. If the Left votes are added, it comes to a grand total of 20 per cent. Even if the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD joins this motley conglomeration, the total would only increase to 21.30 per cent, which is distinctly less than either the UPA or the NDA. Throw into this reckoning the projection that the performance of the Left in West Bengal and Kerala is bound to go down, according to ground realities, and it is difficult to understand how the promoters of the Third Front imagine that they can even reach the starting point of this race. If they had claimed that they were going to give the UPA a good fight, it might have been somewhat more realistic. For now, the most charitable way to characterise the pretensions of the Third Front is to call them not game changers but non-starters.

The other contradictions of the Third Front have to be mentioned. The parties trying to come together have no ideology to bind them, certainly not the values of secularism or economic policies. All that binds them is a doomed-at-birth attempt to come together on the basis of being anti-Congress and anti-BJP. They have no common, political, economic or social agenda, and, by their own admission, are really telling people to put their faith in them based on no perceptible plan of action or political philosophy. This is at best a feeble manifesto and one highly unlikely to inspire any confidence. Thus, even without going into the less edifying inconsistencies in the Third Front, particularly the precondition laid down by almost each one of the constituents claiming the office of Prime Minister, it is clear that the idea of the Third front is stillborn and not fated to translate into reality.

The NDA has all but disintegrated, and is virtually struggling to stay afloat. Their major allies have deserted them and the morale in the NDA camp has sunk so low that it has had its repercussions, even within the BJP, which have begun to become public. The NDA/BJP is in no position to present even a credible challenge to the UPA headed by the Congress. The Third Front is a non-starter. The country has, however, become quite clearly bipolar, between secular and communal forces, with a rainbow coalition of strong regional parties joining either of the two formations and representing regional interests under the umbrella of a national vision represented by the pivotal national party. Thus, the vision presented by the Congress/UPA is that of a strong national development agenda aimed at the empowerment of the most disadvantaged sections of society and enriched by the viewpoint and aspirations of all regions of India. It is this vision which will win the mandate of the people in the election to the 15th Lok Sabha, and not the defeatism of the NDA, or the misplaced opportunism of the Third Front, which will only have the effect of indirectly helping the very communal forces which they claim to implacably oppose.

Jayanthi Natarajan is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha and AICC spokesperson.

The views expressed in this column are her own.