The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : Third front: a non-starter

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Dec 23, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Third front: a non-starter

By Harish Khare

The third front idea promotes a certain kind of unappetising political leaders and seeks to reward their equally unhealthy impulses and interests.

THE IDEA of a "third front" in Indian politics keeps getting resurrected periodically. It is going to get kicked around over the next few months as various segments of the Left are scheduled to debate their "lines," including the desirability of reviving the third front, at their respective party congresses. Whether the Left parties intend it or not, the enemies of the United Progressive Alliance Government are already permitting themselves a gleeful smile. As it happens, most of the non-Left political formations are variously ignorant of the culture of internal debate in the Left and are invariably prone to misunderstand the Communist parties' doctrine-centric formulations.

The third front idea can be traced to Ram Manohar Lohia's omnibus anti-Congressism, dating back to the mid-1960s, when the Congress loomed very large on the Indian political scene and the non-Congress parties were hopelessly divided and too weak to mount any kind of challenge. Except the Communist party and its various offshoots, almost all other non-Congress groups and their leaders also happened to have personal animosities and disagreements with the Congress leaders, especially the Nehru-Gandhi family. Whatever the reason, the Lohiaite anti-Congressism made electoral tactical sense, because beginning with the 1952 elections, the Congress could never win a majority of popular vote and it was common sense that the Congress could be booted out only if all its rivals were able to pool their votes behind one candidate. But this sensible proposition was rarely put into practice, primarily because of highly antagonistic contradictions among the non-Congress parties; these contradictions were rooted in the social realities of rural India.

The Lohiaite anti-Congressism, nonetheless, made certain kind of political permissiveness fashionable. Any group, any party, and any leader who declared itself/himself in opposition to the Congress were deemed to be politically correct and worthy of admiration. The post-Emergency Janata Party was the finest culmination of this omnibus anti-Congressism. The collapse of the Janata Party because of the internal contradictions is a well-known phase of our recent history; but it needs to be remembered that the experiment had only one lasting consequence. It provided respectability to the Jana Sangh/Bharatiya Janata Party and its patron, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Nonetheless, anti-Congressism reasserted itself in 1989 when the Left and the BJP propped up a National Front, which collapsed within 18 months, giving another boost not only to communal forces but also to the right-wing ideas and ideologues. The National Front regime paved the way for the 1991 decisive right turn in our polity.

The National Front experiment also gave a fillip to the politics of caste leader at the expense of every canon of wholesome politics or ideology-based articulation. Caste-based politics was, willy-nilly, accepted as a necessary antidote to the communal forces. The post-Mandal success of caste politics set the stage for an irreversibly fractured polity.

By the time the 1996 Lok Sabha elections came, the national parties were either stagnant or in decline to become the fulcrum of stability at the national level. And the United Front was formed. Driven by a desire to keep both the Congress and the BJP out of power, assorted parties and leaders joined hands to provide a "third front" alternative. The experiment failed in its two stated objectives. First, it did not slow down the growth and spread of the "communal" forces; and secondly, it did not reverse the process of liberalisation/globalisation of the economy that had begun in 1991.

This was not at all surprising because the United Front was a tactical device to enable all kinds of leaders to play out their regional or personal political aspirations. The first United Front Steering Committee, for instance, consisted of leaders such as Arjun Singh, Madhavrao Scindia, G.K. Moopanar and P. Chidambaram, all of whom were key players in the 1991-1996 swing towards liberalisation; they found themselves in the United Front company only because of their personal differences with P.V. Narasimha Rao, the then Congress president. This collection of highly personalised leaders only meant constant instability at the Centre. It also made the BJP an attractive proposition to the newly empowered and influential middle classes. The BJP became the preferred party of the corporate forces as also of the middle classes, which hankered for "stability." The polity is now afflicted with a Kafkaesque absurdity: first anti-Congressism strengthened the BJP, and then anti-BJPism brought an upswing in the Congress fortunes, enabling Manmohan Singh to cobble together a far from satisfactory coalition.

In itself, a third front is not such an outlandish idea; after all, the two "national parties" — the Congress and the BJP — barely command between them a majority of the Lok Sabha seats. And it can be argued that the non-Congress, non-BJP voices are entitled to want to provide a viable alternative at the national level. Unfortunately the polity, as it is constituted today, cannot afford a third front luxury. A third front has to necessarily consist of regional parties. There is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about a regional party; by definition, a regional party is born when the national parties fail to appreciate and accommodate local sentiments and local leaders. It can be further argued that as part of natural progression, these regional leaders learn to shoulder national-level responsibility once they become part of a coalition at the Centre.

The third front idea thus becomes an invitation to the regional or State-based leaders to nurture national ambitions. Nothing intrinsically wrong with the flowering of such aspirations. However, in this age of coalition, regional leaders do acquire a national veto and often become an anti-thesis to collective national good.

With the possible exception of the Nationalist Congress Party, almost every other regional party can be essentially pared down as a caste party, centred around a leader. Given the deepening electoral competitiveness, the smaller the party the minimum are its institutional concerns. And to the extent the third front idea deepens these leaders' appeal, the polity is prevented in its healthy discovery of ideology and ideas. The worst sufferer is the Left movement. The central committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), in its review of the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, noted the deleterious effect: "One of the problems facing the Party and the democratic movement in this connection has been sharply focussed once again in these elections. That is the continuing, and in some places, the intensification of the caste appeal and fragmentation of the political forces on caste lines. Caste based parties or the appeal of caste leaders in parties have succeeded in wooing away sections of people who should have been mobilised by us."

The third front idea puts a premium on not only a leader's caste-centric appeal, but it also provides a licence for leader-centric politics of negotiation, bargaining and intrigue. It is unfortunately true that almost all political parties — national or regional or sub-regional — suffer from a lack of internal democratic culture; but this undemocratic impulse gets institutionalised in these smaller parties.

The accent is on the leader, not on the party or its presumed constituency. The leader's doings — and undoings — have to be overlooked, all in the name of fighting the bigger political "enemy", the BJP or the Congress. In the process, the public opinion gets completely tired of the third front leaders' antics and eventually settles down for this or that "national" party.

Because the third front idea promotes a certain kind of unappetising political leaders and seeks to reward their equally unhealthy impulses and interests, it is basically at odds with the requirement of coherence and efficacy at the Centre. The institutional authority of the Prime Minister suffers substantial erosion. Even at the best of times, the Indian polity witnesses a daily tug of war between centripetal and centrifugal forces. In the near conceivable future, whosoever presides over New Delhi would need to have the requisite political elbowroom to deal effectively with a host of global forces and voices, all out to make unhappy, even rapacious, demands on us. Collective wisdom would need to be summoned to present a united front against these external players and their internal collaborators. Given this challenging context, the third front idea is decidedly a bad thought and an unhelpful tactical ploy.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News Update

Stories in this Section

USE AND ABUSE OF THE INTERNET

FOR LIBERTY'S SAKE

Third front: a non-starter

Parliament on television

The latest act in the tragedy that is Zahira