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