Expect surprises, upsets

THE VOTE OF confidence and the denouement of the nuclear deal had an unintended impact. They served as catalyst for a realignment of forces. The new-found affection for the US and the Congress in the Samajwadi Party (SP) leadership seemed for a moment to put an end to the effort to put together a third front.
Yet, in days, and not weeks, a new player moved into the vacuum. The various regional parties and the Left were agreed on one player to be placed at the centre of the new calculus: Mayawati and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
In the past, the leadership of such non-Congress fronts that were aligned against the BJP was vested with politicians of a very different hue. The original exponent of such efforts in north India, Charan Singh, was a peasant leader. The man who actually knit together a national Front in the late 1980s was a rebel Congressman, VP Singh. Those who headed such governments included HD Deve Gowda, the first ever member of the Mandal classes to have become prime minister.
If the landed groups, mostly those who got full peasant proprietorship rights after Independence, were the fulcrum of earlier efforts, then the best evidence of the shift of the pivot was their deferring to a Dalit, and a woman at that. In the past, as all are painfully aware, such efforts have come undone partly due to confusion over who ought (or ought not) to lead.
Mayawati being at the forefront is not on account of numbers. With 17 MPs in the Lok Sabha, her party is far behind the 44-member CPI (M) and 59-member Left Front. However, besides the fact that she rules UP, it is the symbolic power she represents that makes a greater difference.
Her party matters more than most are aware of. VP Singh's Janata Dal may have won 144 seats but it lacked an organisational backbone. By 1996, the Janata Dal was a loose confederal arrangement of regional chieftains like Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar. But the BSP has an ideology and a clear chain of command. Where the Left was built around labour unions, Mayawati's mentor Kanshi Ram crafted the movement around Scheduled Caste and Backward Class government servants. The salience of this was put to test best in UP.
But it would be naïve to ignore her reach beyond the state. This is clear in the Hindi belt states adjacent to UP. In the north and central Indian states due to go to polls this winter, the party has a significant presence in as many as 125 seats. Expect surprises and upsets, come election time.
The Dalit-led party and the regional groups are joined by a third pillar: the Left. The evolution of leaders like Lalu and Mulayam from insurgent social rebels into a new version of the landed gentry has been long in the making. So has the ability of the Dalit movement to take up secular issues such as law and order. The Left has awoken rather late in the day.
Yet, even as the Left has taken a step in this direction, it may want to introspect on how the Dalit currents galvanised the down-trodden in the heartland in a way that the classical class cleavage-based politics never did. It's a long journey but the new Third Front has a lot that is new. It should stir things up and open up new spaces in the polity. It may give the UPA sleepless nights just as the celebrations about the trust vote get over.