Defeat certain, Congress banks on Third Front
With less than a fortnight to go before the last votes are cast in the ongoing lok Sabha election and with the Congress faced with certain defeat, the ruling party has begun releasing balloons of doing business with a possible Third Front. At least two senior Congress leaders have recently suggested that the party could consider either supporting a Third Front Government or seeking the rag-tag combine's help to return to power. Mr Ahmed Patel, political secretary to party president Sonia Gandhi, and Union Minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, have hinted at the thought-process that has gripped the Congress, given that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi appear to be leaving it far behind in the race — as findings of recent opinion poll surveys show. While Mr Patel said the Congress was always open to “like-minded parties” in a bid to keep “communal forces at bay”, Mr Ramesh went a step ahead and suggested that the party could even be “part of the Third Front arrangement”, in order to ensure political stability. Even if we for a moment humour leaders of the Congress who still believe that a cohesive Third Front is a possibility (which really is not the case) and that the voters are going to give a fractured verdict (which they seem in no mood to do if the high voting turnouts are any indication), what emerges without a doubt is that the party has thrown in the towel. It has realised that neither can it form a Government on its own strength nor will the UPA which it helms get a renewed mandate from the people to rule the nation. The Congress's desperation to keep ‘all options' open flies in the face of confident assertions that some of its other leaders such as Mr Sachin Pilot have been making that the UPA will not only do well but will return to power on its strength. Try as it might want to pass its latest thinking as driven by a desire to provide political stability to the country post-election, the Congress cannot disguise its real motive: Somehow, even if it means stitching together an arrangement that mocks the voters' verdict, prevent the BJP from coming to power and Mr Modi from becoming the Prime Minister. The bogey of ‘secularism' suits the disparate anti-BJP and the anti-Modi elements that are otherwise at loggerheads with one another in normal times. Secularism is the glue that, the Congress believes, will hold them together.
The problem is that the people have experienced similar experiments in the past and have paid a heavy price for them. They are no longer keen on a repeat of those harrowing times when governance came to a standstill and the rulers spent all their working hours trying either to enhance their positions or placate one partner or the other who threatened to rock the boat. The voters are certainly not enamoured of a bunch of politicians who come under one umbrella merely to fulfil their life-time ambition of becoming the Prime Minister, and have nothing else — certainly not the desire to push for good governance — in common. The Congress has the dubious record of having destroyed every such Third Front regime it had propped up. That it should be again thinking of backing a similar alternative or even being part of governance by the Front, should alarm not just the voters but also constituents of the failed idea.