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.

A similar anti-Congressism held together the National Front in 1989 with the centrist Janata Dal and regional parties like the DMK, AGP and TDP inside it. Supported by the Left and BJP from outside, the NF faced an awkwardness similar to the one JP grappled with in the mid-’70s on account of RSS-Jana Sangh participation in the anti-Congress mobilisation. But in 1989, as in 1977, for “secular forces”, sleeping with the Jana Sangh/BJP wasn’t an unbearable discomfort.

With the BJP’s successful mobilisation on the Ram temple issue, came rampaging anti-BJPism. The United Front government formed in 1996 with the stated objective of keeping the BJP out of power subsisted on Congress support. At one time, former CPM general secretary, E.M.S. Namboodiripad, had declared the choice between the Congress and BJP as one “between cholera and plague”; under Harkishan Singh Surjeet, the CPM announced the BJP to be the greater evil. Throughout the ’90s, the secular-communal faultline enjoyed pride of place among all-India political cleavages.

In the UNPA, it is not just that nearly all constituents have supped with the BJP or Congress or both. Earlier antagonisms were neither tidy nor pure. What has changed is this: even the overhang of the grand narrative has been dispensed with.

This is not all intended, of course. With the thinning of the Congress at the Centre and in the states through the ’90s, anti-Congressism had lost its currency by the turn of this decade. Now, the Left’s privileging of “anti-imperialism” over “secularism” as elections draw near seems to be the belated flagging of another change. The secular-communal divide has lost its relevance as an explanation of the politics of our time.

Two other elements of the new third front underline the unsettling of older political reflexes: the absence of the Janata Dal at its heart and the emergence of the BSP at its head.

The most flamboyant herald bearers of the Janata Dal — born as the left-of-centre alternative to the Congress in 1988 and that split for the 13th time at last count — are within the Congress-led UPA today. Lalu Prasad Yadav has reinvented himself as doughty pillar of a Congress-led regime. Mulayam Singh Yadav has just helped the Manmohan Singh government survive the Left-led onslaught. Ram Vilas Paswan is a crucial Congress ally. With Sharad Yadav having migrated to the BJP-led NDA, the UNPA may have to make do with Deve Gowda and Ajit Singh from the many-splintered Janata parivar.

But nothing drives home the political shift more than Mayawati’s leadership role in the third front. Despite her imperfections, Mayawati represents the most radical political impulse to be unleashed in the post-Congress polity. The Dalit leader would be the natural inheritor, therefore, of the mantle of leader of the third alternative in its best version — as the fight against closures built into the bi-polar system. Yet Mayawati’s leadership of the UNPA will be a strange thing.

For all her recent efforts to reach out to non-Dalit groups and pitch a broader political tent, she remains uncomfortable with other political leaders and the media. Under her stewardship, the BSP is opportunistic in the most straightforward sense of the term. If Kanshi Ram dispensed with the Dalit dilemma of which must come first — power or structural reform — in favour of the former, Mayawati has steered the BSP to even greater focus. In every crisis at the Centre in recent memory — including the trust vote on July 22 — she has displayed the same candid brinkmanship. “The BSP will open its cards only at the end,” she says. In other words, the BSP will hold out for the best deal in that situation.

What does this mean for the third front? Sceptics have seen it as a permissive political space, no more than a unity of resentments. In its latest avatar it seems especially stripped down — shorn of both larger-than-life anti-Congressism and anti-BJPism, to be headed by a party that unabashedly leverages its transferable vote base and wears its disdain of political niceties on its sleeve.

The choice is ours. We could see in the UNPA the receding of the hopes and conceits of a third alternative. Or we could see it as a signpost of the political reality that has been with us awhile.

In a fragmented system that is increasingly federal and competitive, strategic considerations will trump ideology for political players. Local compulsions dominate in the parties that are “national” as well as those called “regional” — in terms of their political calculus, that distinction is a waning one. The single member-simple plurality electoral system, and the fact that decision-making within parties continues to be whimsical, encourages shifting alliances born of ideological flexibility.

For us, then, the question is not: is the third front a third alternative any more? It is, perhaps: when politics becomes a bare-knuckled numbers game, why must the burden of difference rest so disproportionately on the number three?

vandita.mishra@expressindia.com