For a brief moment, in the run-up to the trust vote in Parliament last month, the UNPA seemed like a third front that can. The impression was fleeting, the Manmohan Singh government survived, and the UNPA is back to making news for all the usual third front reasons — the wavering loyalties of some of its constituents in particular.

But for all the apparent similarities, the UNPA is not the nucleus of a born-again third front. To be headed by Mayawati — though she hasn’t yet formally joined it — and powered by the Left, it is a redefinition of the third space. In relation to it, the first and second spaces in the polity are being redefined as well.

Some things remain the same. The UNPA just doesn’t have the numbers. The 12 parties that could be counted in this alliance in-the-making — including the RLD and JD(S) that are said to be actively reconsidering their options — add up to less than a hundred seats in the 14th Lok Sabha. Yet the UNPA will be a different third front. It is defined neither by an overriding anti-Congressism, nor an overarching anti-BJPism.

It was vaulting anti-Congressism that originally brought together parties with disparate agendas in a loose grouping in 1977. At that time, the Jana Sangh was part of the Janata Party, therefore the latter might be more correctly described as the second front. Yet the third fronts that came up later would draw their legitimising force, if not their practice, from the political capital spectacularly accumulated and frittered away by the Janata Party. At its peak, it combined a piercing Lohiaiite critique of the Congress with the crusading resistance mounted by the JP movement to the corrupt Congress regime.

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