This neutral constituency, surely the largest, is also being wooed by the Left. Their call for the third front means nothing more than that. The third front to them means anti-Congressism coupled with anti-BJPism. However, in the past five years, the Left’s version of anti-Congressism has considerably changed. In 1977, in the JP and the Janata days, the Left did not mind having “floor management” with the saffrons. In 1989, when the Left and the BJP supported the V.P. Singh government, it was a further extension of that line. Then there was a time when they used to describe the BJP and the Congress as two sides of the same coin (or two branches of the same capitalist-imperialist tree). But after the BJP-led NDA came to power, the Left began to adopt what was known in the ’60s as the “Dange Line”. Comrade Dange, the then chairman of the Communist Party of India, used to say that the Congress is a bourgeois-nationalist party and not a reactionary-communal-fascist outfit. He was of the view that the Congress had a mass base and should be supported to keep it away from communal and right-wing association. The CPM was sharply critical of this view, but since 2004 has been practising the Dange line of realpolitik.

It is against this backdrop of ideological predilections and deviations that the elections in 2009 will be fought. In the early ’90s the BJP and the Left had opposed economic liberalisation. They were opposed to GATT and later the WTO. Now the BJP champions the liberal cause. The so-called “shining India” campaign was a celebration of liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation (LPG). The Left, willy-nilly, has also joined the bandwagon, with Jyoti Basu declaring that socialism is not the immediate agenda.

... contd.