For all of the last month or so,
people have been stopping journalists in the streets and asking the same questions: will there be an election?
And then they say: "Whatever happens, I hope these bloody Third Front guys don''t come to power." Most of us will have observed the growing disdain of the educated middle class for the Third Front. Even lifelong BJP voters who would froth at the mouth about a
party led by an Italian-born person, will now tell you that they would be happier to see Manmohan Singh back in
office than to see some Third Front-type stride into Race Course Road.
At that stage, we believed that the only real alternative to the Congress comprised the
forces that became the Janata Party, what we call the Third Front
today. The Janata Party consisted of former Congressmen (but Morarji Desai, Jagjivan Ram and RK Hegde rather than today''s version which consists of people like Amar Singh), socialists (men like George Fernandes), kulaks (Charan Singh''s crowd) and the sort of local notables who would have backed the old-style Congress but had been either put off or booted out by Indira Gandhi.
Of course, the
government that came out of this phase also fell but not before it had unleashed the forces of casteism and transformed cow-belt politics forever. The Third Front re-emerged in 1996 when Narasimha Rao''s corrupt Congress government crashed to defeat. Then, it was the Congress that propped up a Third Front government to keep the BJP from taking office.
One reason why people are fed up of the Third Front lies in its history.
Nobody really believes that a fourth Third Front .
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