With no binding idea or ideological compass to help them navigate, the participants of the recent New Delhi congregation of 14 anti-Congress and anti-BJP forces have projected the gathering just as a platform against communal forces and never ventured to call it a virtual move for a third alternative. Like all desperate efforts, the hastily cobbled front of regional leaders, with no vision of India and, in many cases, with no sense of India outside of their own states, appeared to grope in the dark, unable to work towards a common goal.
While the Left’s frantic efforts to crawl back from political oblivion are evident in its initiative to bring in such a disparate group together for an anti-communal front, CPM’s general secretary Prakash Karat, for all his holier-than-BJP-and-Congress posturing, was in effect playing the same opportunistic games as his political allies and adversaries -exploiting minority sentiments in a sharply polarised polity with a view to reaping dividends in the elections expected in May 2014.    
Among the gathering of leaders for the “Convention for People’s Unity Against Communalism” were Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, Mulayam Singh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Naveen Patnaik of the BJD, Praful Patel of the NCP, Karat, A B Bardhan of the CPI, Sharad Yadav of the JD (U), H D Deve Gowda of the JD (S) and Bijayant Panda of the Biju Janata Dal. The unpredictable Jayalalithaa of the AIADMK kept off the rally herself while sending a representative. Mamata Banerjee of Trinamul Congress did not attend, the Left being the host.
Most of the participants are powerful in their own domain, personality-propelled and self-centric to the core. A few run governments that have proved largely effective. Almost all of them have been once allies, one way or the other, of the BJP-led NDA or the Congress-led UPA coalitions. They would not let go any opportunity again to be part of a new coalition or existing ones as in today’s context of brazenly opportunistic politics, convergence comes from common interests and not from ideologically driven policies or love for minorities.
They could, however, hardly make for a cohesive formation as their ideologies are sharply at variance and their ambitions run on parallel tracks. Many leaders make no secret about their prime ministerial ambitions. The absence of a centre of gravity could make the jostling between leaders to be first among equals more fierce and paralysing.
Janata Dal (S) leader Deve Gowda, on the backfoot after associating with the BJP in the recent by-elections in Karnataka, tried to get out of the scrape by blaming his son Kumarasamy for the pact and by recalling that as prime minister many years ago he had dismissed the BJP government in Gujarat.
Nitish Kumar, who parted ways with the BJP on the Narendra Modi issue only recently, said at the forum that this was not the time to speak of a new front, but to bring together all secular and democratic forces as much as was “practically possible.” Not many days ago, on his way back from China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had urged all secular forces to join hands against the BJP in the coming Lok Sabha election. It is too early to say if there is any link between the two observations.
The main chink in the front concept is that the parties that seek to form it are usually drawn together by some grievance or driven by negativism, a dislike of the BJP and the Congress. The anti-Congressism that animated the third force in the 1980s has lost its bite, so has the anti-BJPism that rallied smaller parties together in the 1990s. By now, most regional parties have flitted in and out of the Congress-led UPA or the BJP-led NDA, or both, for self-serving reasons and at opportune moments. There is no reason to believe that this reality has changed. A new unifying idea or ideology for a third force has not yet been spelled out, much less nurtured.
As things stand now, a Third Front will not get anywhere near the numbers it will need to form a government. So more than a coherent and bounded grouping driven by an ambition to form government, the Third Front can again be seen as an open and shifting space in a diverse polity that allows parties to come together and break apart according to changing interests and compulsions.