Another Third Front?

It took only a few steps that Jyoti Basu walked along with senior LF leaders in the Capital recently and the few moments he shared on a dais with some Opposition leaders at a dharna against the NDA government8217;s quot;apathyquot; towards West Bengal, to once again raise the hopes of Third Front proponents. If all goes according to plan, the erstwhile constituents of the erstwhile Front will regroup once again 8212; in two layers. First, those parties which are attached neither to the BJP nor the Congress 8212; CPI, CPM, RSP, Forward Block, Samajwadi Party, JD S 8212; will come together. The second stage will see the realignment of this combine with outfits like the RJD, which has a tie-up with the Congress and the former United Front partners now in the NDA. All this is to be achieved under the leadership of Jyoti Basu. At the risk of spoiling the party, it must be pointed out at the very outset that there is a very real problem here. For one, given that Basu resigned last month as chief minister of West Bengal, citing illhealth as reason, the 87-year-old is spectacularly miscast in the role of Dynamic Leader of Rejuvenated Front. And after Basu, there is the same old chaos 8212; that familiar set of squabbling leaders carrying that same stale load of unrequited ambitions.

Be it the fizzling out of the Janata Party promise in the late seventies or the unravelling of the National Front and then the United Front in the nineties, it has been the story of an experiment going comprehensively awry. To begin with, there is the problem of too many prime ministerial wannabes. Virtually every party in the Front, major as well as minor, has its own candidate for the top job; the inability to reconcile warring egos has extracted a heavy toll. Then there is the problem of agenda. Traditionally, the Third Front has been born of and has sustained itself on an anti-politics; it has shown a persistent reluctance to forge an affirmative agenda it could call its own. If it was anti-Congressism that was its entire raison d8217;etre earlier, anti-BJPism has been added to the list in the past decade or so. And herein lies a twist in the tale. While some constituents would have the Front maintain an equidistance between the Congress and the BJP, others, notably Harkishan Singh Surjeet8217;s CPM, have notexactly been averse to cosying up with the Congress to take on the BJP. The Front continues to be dogged by other areas of incoherence as well. As it righteously proclaims war on communalism, for instance, it is markedly less aggressive on the issue of corruption. Its willingness to welcome Laloo Prasad Yadav8217;s RJD or Jayalalitha8217;s AIADMK on board is proof of this ambivalence.

There is no reason to believe that in its latest incarnation, the Third Front will not inherit the old problems along with the old faces. There is no reason to assume that this time round, the old tensions will find new resolution. The Third Front has been that space in the Indian polity that has accommodated smaller players anxious to assert their identity outside the penumbra of the national parties. But until this grouping can find a shared coherent agenda, it will continue to determinedly prove its worst critics right.