Though the government and the Bharatiya Janata Party have been thinking aloud about dissolving the Lok Sabha and calling for early elections, a preliminary report submitted by the Intelligence Bureau to the Union home ministry on Thursday says that in the current situation, the BJP and the Congress together are unlikely to bag more than 250 seats, with 150 to the former and about 100 to the latter.
This has galvanised some of the smaller political parties to start debating the possibility of reviving the third front. Some of these players met yesterday for a
luncheon at the residence of Janata Dal United politician Sharad Yadav.A home ministry official told rediff.com that despite the BJP's optimism and the feel-good factor in the economy, the party's performance in Uttar Pradesh, where it may be forced to go it alone, may not be good. Uttar Pradesh sends 81 MPs to the Lok Sabha.
The Bahujan Samaj Party has talked of giving 'conditional support' to the Congress in Uttar Pradesh. But the other big player in the state, the Samajwadi Party, cannot go over to the BJP because of strong ideological differences. If it were to even go in for seat adjustments with the BJP, the Samajwadi Party runs the risk of losing its entire captive Muslim vote to the Congress and the BSP.
In the other critical Hindi belt state of Bihar also, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance's tally is likely to come down with Laloo Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal taking 20 or so of the 40
The participants at the luncheon discussed the IB report and argued that the BJP's 'feel-good factor' is confined to the upper and middle classes and the poor are unlikely to fall for either the claim or the government's sops, which too are targeted at the middle classes and government employees.
In this context, one politician cited the example of former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, whose government gave big concessions to its employees and yet bit the dust in the election last month.If neither the BJP nor the Congress can get into a position from which they can try to form a government, some of their allies may well cross over to the third front, the hopefuls at Yadav's house claimed. The parties most likely to cross the floor are believed to be Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party and M Karunanidhi's Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, both Congress allies, and the JD-U, currently a constituent of the NDA.
Pawar in any case has been opposed to Sonia Gandhi becoming prime minister while there is not much love lost between the DMK and the Congress. They have simply been forced to come together by circumstances.
