Congress-led ministry is safe for at least a year

Politicians love to talk of how they and they alone represent the "common man". More often, however, they are busy mouthing the latest gossip spun by urban rumour mills.

Lok Janshakti Party president Ram Vilas Paswan was doing precisely that when he accused the Rashtriya Janata Dal of "conspiring with the Bharatiya Janata Party to topple the United Progressive Alliance". Paswan was speaking in the context of the Bihar polls yet there are enough people in Delhi who take this theory quite seriously.

The fear is rooted in the fact that the Congress has barely half the seats required for a majority in the Lok Sabha (defined as 50 per cent plus one, namely 273). Its government rests on the fact that many more small parties were willing to support the Congress rather than the Bharatiya Janata Party. So what happens if all the smaller groups meaning neither Congress nor BJP MPs get together? The arithmetic of this Lok Sabha is such that they will still be short of a majority, but it will be a different story should the BJP choose to offer support from outside.

Paswan, who is temporarily in the Congress camp, is trying to win Sonia Gandhi's backing by creating a bogeyman.

Credibility

The logic is that Lalu Prasad Yadav will blame the Congress if the Rashtriya Janata Dal fails to win a majority in Bihar, becoming just angry enough to woo the BJP leaders. Paswan has thus raised the spectre of the fabled Third Front.

His thesis has received credibility of a sort because the Left Front has independently been grumbling about the manner in which Congress ministers are discarding the principles of the Common Minimum Programme.

Prakash Karat, who seems destined to succeed Harkishen Singh Surjeet as General-Secretary of the CPI (M), menacingly mutters that it should not be the exclusive responsibility of the Left Front to keep this ministry in power.

So, is there any credibility to the rumour that the BJP might do what the Congress did in 1996 namely to offer support to a motley crew in order to keep the Congress away? Not really, it is hard to see how the BJP could gain from such shenanigans; the party is still in the process of rebuilding its base in the wake of the last General Election and needs to concentrate on those efforts. No, if the United Progressive Alliance breaks up it will only be because of the internal contradictions implicit in such a group. Let me go further, should the coalition fall it will be because of the Left Front rather than Laloo Prasad Yadav.

However, forget all about Paswan's bombast and the dark mumbling of the Left, the United Progressive Alliance ministry is safe for at least a year if not more. The mathematics of a Third Front may be correct but the chemistry is completely wrong!

The writer is a well-known political commentator.