The proclaimed revival of intimacies between the JD(S) and BJP in Karnataka is likely to further whittle down the idea of the Third Front at the Centre. For a while back there, it seemed that its latest avatar, the UNPA, would bag another member instead of steadily losing the ones it started out with, like J. Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK. The BJP is “communal”, Gowda Senior had declared sternly after his son refused to honour his party’s commitment to the BJP and step down as chief minister. The JD(S) would maintain “equidistance from the Congress and BJP”, he said. But before the former prime minister — of an erstwhile Third Front government at the Centre — could carry his party into the fledgling Third Front, his party, or a faction of it, has sent him scurrying back to the BJP.

The idea of a third force has not exactly had a good run in the states where the dominant trend is towards bipolarisation. In some states the political system has settled and stabilised into a two-party system, in others the political field is tidily carved up between two fronts. In Gujarat, for instance, the contest is firmly between the Congress and the BJP — when it is not between the BJP and BJP, that is. A DMK-led alliance battles the AIADMK-led alliance in Tamil Nadu. The reasons for the unviability of the third party are in part structural. The first-past-the-post electoral system, as opposed to the proportional representation system, encourages the formation of a stable two-party system. A state like Uttar Pradesh, where the contest remains stubbornly multi-polar, is an outlier to this trend.

But the failure of the third force or front is also political. Its serial collapse at the Centre shows that the Third Front has failed to grow up from a political entity that defines itself by what it is not — non-Congress and non-BJP — to one that commits itself to a shared political agenda. As it periodically courts photo-ops with UNPA leaders, the Left in particular would do well to heed the message that has been amplified by Karnataka. There is no tactical or political gain in pumping up a Front that will not hold. Comrades must realise that they can either be with the Congress or be alone. There is no third option.