The UPA government won Tuesday’s trust vote, but ultimately the biggest winner to emerge out of the whole imbroglio may be Mayawati. A month ago, there were only two real contenders to be India’s prime minister: L.K.

Advani and whomever Sonia Gandhi might tip as the Congress’ nominee. Now there are three. In the event of a BSP sweep in Uttar Pradesh and an otherwise fragmented verdict between the UPA and NDA, Mayawati could indeed emerge as a compromise candidate for India’s top political spot. But the talk goes far beyond just the circumstances that could lead Mayawati to be the country’s second female and first scheduled caste prime minister; she is now being talked about as the centre of gravity for a nascent third front. Undoubtedly, the BSP will remain a force to be reckoned with in Uttar Pradesh for the foreseeable future. The real question is whether, out of the shifting alignments set in motion by the Left’s withdrawal of support from the UPA government, a stable third front can emerge with Mayawati at the helm. And on this question, there is reason to be sceptical about the emergence of a coherent and durable third front whose members remain firmly outside the orbits of the Congress and the BJP.

The major problem facing a potential BSP-led third front is the lack of glue that would hold the alliance together. One potential source of cohesiveness is ideology. Third front constituents might stick together over the long haul if their leaders’ long-term ideological commitments to a third way trumped potential short-term political gains. But, what could possibly constitute the ideological glue that holds Mayawati’s caste-based social engineering together with Jayalalitha’s populism, Prakash Karat’s anti-imperialist social democracy, Brindaban Goswami’s regionalist and ethnic appeals, and Chandrababu Naidu’s visions of technology-led development? Instead, state-level political exigencies unite these parties. Virtually all of these parties compete principally with the Congress (or one of its current allies) at the state-level, and many of them are also unwilling to concede too much space to the BJP lest they lose their upper hand to the saffron party in state politics (i.e., TDP, INLD, AGP). But many of these political equations are not set in stone as future Congress-AIADMK or BJP-INLD tie-ups are hardly out of the question. And if political expediency is all that would keep third front parties united behind the BSP, then what would stop any of them from unceremoniously quitting a third front, just as the Samajwadi Party dropped the UNPA when the Congress came calling?

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