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The why front

As courtships go, this must rank among the briefest of them all, and can be divided into two phases: before the assembly poll and after the assembly poll, based on the ardour with which the Samajwadi Party courted Sonia Gandhi and her Congress, and the sudden vanishing act it did once election results started trickling in. Today, Mulayam Singh Yadav has turned into one of the most strident critics of the Congress president.

Not surprising, really, since his initial wooing was not based on any genuine liking for either the party or its chief, but done with an intent to take advantage of what he perceived -- wrongly, it has since become very clear -- as a callow politician.

That was a mistake committed not by just the otherwise savvy politician from Etawah. Even dyed-in-the-wool veterans of Communist persuasion were guilty of the same assumption, not to mention leader-writers and opinion-makers. Now, as an assertive Sonia reaches out for her right, the nebulous third front that was seeking its place in the sun, even if it was only under a Congress umbrella, has all but fallen apart.

With the Congress rebuff, the third front, of which the SP and its soulmate from Bihar, the Rashtriya Janata Dal are key constituents, is faced with its moment of truth. As politics goes, the ideology represented by them is incapable of winning over large sections of society, which is necessary to win federal power on their own. So, perforce, they need an alliance with a centrist outfit. And, so long as the Congress was on the decline, especially in the northern states, there was no problem.

The third front, essentially, was a creation, an offshoot of the Mandal politics indulged in by Vishwanath Pratap Singh. The idea behind it was a welcome one: to shift the political focus away from personalities, as it had been till then, to ground-level issues. Unfortunately, even splendid intentions meet their Waterloo in men, and so it was that this break from the past assumed the colours of a strictly casteist movement. With its core having thus been denuded of pith, no wonder personality is once again triumphing in Indian politics.

The politics of the third front is essentially regional, so there is little fear of its influence fading altogether. For some time yet, it will manage to survive, before a weary electorate decides to pledge its troth to who it perceives to be in a position to serve its interests better. It has happened before, notably with the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal, and it will happen again with the many avatars of the Janata Dal.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, it is who stands to lose the maximum from the revival of the Congress party in the Hindi heartland, more than any other constituent of the third front, which perhaps explains his anger at what he considers Sonia's perfidy in not playing ball and dislodging the BJP government. The Left parties in the east and in the south, have always managed to hold their own in their bastions. Similarly, Laloo Yadav's rise in Bihar predates the decline of the charisma factor in the Congress, and he may yet manage to stay afloat, at the expense of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samata Party.

In UP, the story was a little different. Mulayam Singh and his party benefited directly from the demise of the Congress, and a realignment will have to be at his cost.

The blow this will deal to the cause of the third front will be incalculable, since Uttar Pradesh has been the main theatre of war in the nation's polity. And Mulayam's primacy in the Opposition's alternative formation was owing to the fact that he was king of the country's politically most influential state, and that he could keep it out of the Congress's hands.

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Saisuresh Sivaswamy