Samajwadi Party leader and political stalwart Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose stomping ground is Uttar Pradesh but who is keen to extend his fief, spoke on Sunday of the inevitability of coalition governments. Since this is a no-brainer, and indeed has been the country’s experience for some time, it is appropriate to wonder if the SP leader is really extolling the idea of a Third Front.
This has tended to mean a menagerie of parties that stand up against the Congress and the BJP. This is the case before the general election, while afterwards some of them might do deals with opponents. On one occasion a group of Third Front-type parties even sought the backing of the Congress to run the Central government, although not under the rubric of the Third Front. To that extent such a grouping has been part of the development of the political process in the country when a single-party government is not envisaged.
Until now the Third Front has been a favourite formulation of India’s mainstream Left parties, whose advance since Independence has been so patchy (and non-revolutionary) that they have been obliged to rely on smaller parties (which are usually regional in nature) to come together to oppose the Congress and the BJP. Such a strategy also satisfied the so-called socialist urge of regional parties which usually identify themselves as platforms for social justice.
With the Left not counting for very much these days, the idea of a Third Front had remained quiescent until Mr Yadav’s recent observations, although he did not use that expression. But does it fly? The answer is likely to be in the negative. The Left has tended to be the glue that sticks (sometimes) disparate parties together on the social justice/socialist/secular plank, and was also the force that helped neutralise or smoothen the bulging ambitions of many. With this adhesive not available for the moment, it is hard to see how the SP’s call can put life in the idea of a collective effort with a pre-arranged policy or programmatic agenda that will replace the thinking of both the Congress and the BJP.
Nevertheless, Mr Yadav’s articulation can get the various parties to begin thinking dynamically in a situation in which UPA-2 has been politically weakened after the departure of both the Trinamul Congress and the DMK. But it seems a bit early to speculate if Mr Yadav himself will deem the time right to begin the effort to try and pull down the Manmohan Singh government on the floor of Parliament.