Lok Sabha polls in five phases from Apr 16 to May 13

With former prime minister and Janata Dal (S) chief HD Deve Gowda announcing the rebirth of the Third Front on Monday, the battle for the 15th Lok Sabha has taken a new turn. A two-horse race has become a faceoff between three patchy alliances, one led by the Congress, the second by the BJP and the third by the Left. The election Commission has announced a five-phase poll starting on April 16 and ending on May 13. Results will pour in from May 16.

Opportunistic as they may be, the alliances represent the drawing of loose ideological battle lines along the Centre versus Right versus Left configuration. This could transform poll rhetoric once campaigning gets underway, adding a touch of chemistry to the simple arithmetic of coalition building.

Yet, arithmetic remains the critical element in a polity fragmented along caste and regional lines and the three coalition leaders are frantically searching for winning combinations state-by-state.

The smaller parties are bargaining hard for more seats. All of them know that after the polls, it will be all about numbers and nothing but numbers.

The final shape of the three fronts will emerge in the coming days. But the line-up is more or less clear. Representing the Centre is the Congress with some old partners, and some new. There’s Sharad Pawar’s NCP, Lalu Prasad’s RJD, Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP and M Karunanidhi’s DMK. It is hoping to add two new allies, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress in Bengal and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh.

On the Right is the BJP with its NDA partners, the JD(U) in Bihar, the BJD in Orissa, the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and the Akali Dal in Punjab. It has bagged three new regional allies, OP Chautala’s INLD in Haryana, Ajit Singh’s RLD in Uttar Pradesh and the AGP in Assam.

On the Left are the two Communist Parties and their Left Front allies, Forward Bloc and RSP. They have been joined by Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK in Tamil Nadu, Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP and Chandrashekhar Rao’s TRS in Andhra Pradesh, and Deve Gowda’s JD(S) in Karnataka. And Mayawati’s BSP is seen as a future ally.

Election difficult to call 
Although Mayawati’s BSP is not formally a part of the Third Front arrangement, the Dalit party is widely seen as a probably future ally of the alliance if the latter is in a position to take a shot at forming the next government.

The entry of the Third Front as a definitive non-Congress, non-BJP alternative has made the 2009 elections difficult to call. It harks back to the 1989 and 1996 polls, both of which saw the rise, and subsequent quick fall, of a motley amalgamation of regional forces that sought to position themselves against the two main national parties. The 1989 polls brought VP Singh’s Janata Dal to the fore and the 1996 polls produced the United Front.

Both times, the Congress was the main victim as the so-called Third Front cannibalised its traditional Dalit and Muslim voter bases across the country. But the BJP suffered, too, with the regional parties banding together to halt its march to power.

Will history repeat itself? Or is the Third Front, with its history of unstable and short-lived governments, a spent force that has lost credibility? We’ll have the answer on May 16 when the votes are counted.