The famous tea party arranged by Subramanian Swamy in New Delhi, where J. Jayalalitha met Sonia Gandhi, proved a storm in a tea-cup. The audience granted to Harkishan Singh Surjeet by the AIADMK chief in her Poes Garden palace can be a prelude only to even more of an anti-climax. The ``political earthquake'', as she proudly billed her partying with the Congress president, may have pulled down a coalition government at the Centre, but failed utterly to put another in its place.The encounter between the Puratchi Thalaivi and the Marxist eminence cannot help, either, to pick up and reassemble the pieces of a fallen and fragmented structure. The circumlocutory claim of both after their talks - that they cannot ``rule out'' the return of a Third Front regime at the Centre - is unlikely to cause serious tremors all around. And, for obvious reasons. More obvious than the motive suggested by the Mad Hatter of the tea party, when Swamy says talk of reviving this front will only further the BJP's cause.The claim rings hollow for it comes from one who played a leading role in precipitating the fall of the last Third Front government at the Centre. Besides, it comes from two prominent representatives of the second political front in the current electoral fray. It was the Jain Commission report and the Congress demand for the DMK's ouster from it that brought down the United Front government of I.K. Gujral, and Jayalalitha was not exactly a disinterested observer then.She and Surjeet have been among the earliest to enter into electoral tie-ups with the Congress. The CPI(M) has, in fact, been less reserved about the arrangement than other constituents of the Left Front as, for example, in Bihar. To the AIADMK leader, talk of the Third Front would appear to be, above all, a matter of tactics. Alliances have never prevented her from keeping other political options alone. Especially in such conditions as created by the reiteration of the Congress preference for a single-party alternative at the national helm. Few will be surprised, of course, if she rediscovers the importance of the `foreign origin' issue even during the post-poll run-up to power. This, however, cannot make hers seem a credible conversion to the cult of the Third Front. Alternating between fronts led by the Congress and the BJP does not amount to a principled stand of equidistance between the two.There is a more fundamental reason why the return of the front of some politicians' fantasy can be ``ruled out''. The Third Front is an idea whose time is up. Talk about it can only be a transparent pretence in the midst of the most polarised of India's parliamentary elections ever. It is, in fact, an idea whose time was over quite a few governments away, even if these included some avowedly shaped by it. The Third Front, in any of its combinations, has been unable to wield power without acquiescing in the status of a puppet of outside supporters. It is an idea that may have much to offer the Jayalalithas and Surjeets, hoping to wield a special kind of clout in coalition-based scenarios, but little to a country looking for a way to meaningful political stability.
