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GUEST ARTICLE

        Two senior national leaders, one, the President of India, Dr A P J Kalam, and the other, Shri L K Advani, leader of the Opposition in Parliament, have called for a Two-Party System in the elections to come. Despite the steady failures of the Congress in Punjab, Uttarkhand and Uttar Pradesh elections to the legislative Assemblies, and the failures in civic elections in Mumbai in Maharashtra and Vishakapattinam and Rajahmundry in Andhra Pradesh, it would be too early to write off Congress.

        Following Mayavati's maayajaal in Uttar Pradesh, every party is now engaged in working out a plan for survival. Can Mayavati's dalit- brahmin-Muslim coalition be replicated in other States as well? Are there other Mayavatis waiting on the sidelines in other States as well? Can her maayajaal succeed in overcoming caste conflicts in particularly all States? Can the people conquer their tendencies to create new parties overnight for the most ridiculous of reasons like being denied seats by the parent party to which the new party leaders originally belonged?

        The history of elections in India make pathetic reading. Does anybody realise that between 1952 and 199, a period of four decades there had been as many as 342 parties in the election fray? Most of them lasted just one election before going into oblivion. Just about 21 political parties fought in more than five consecutive elections. The rest of them died natural deaths and were heard of no more. The leading national parties today are the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Now eight regional parties have decided to form a new front to challenge both the INC and BJP.

        They are parties like the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), the Telugu Desam, the Samajwadi Party, the Indian National Lok Dal, the Jharkhand Vikas Morcha, the Asom Gana Parisad etc. It is too early to say when the new coalition of there parties will come into existence, if at all. There is too much talk and too little action. Asked about the relevance of such a Front at a time when the General Elections are not round the corner, Om Prakash Chautala of the Indian National Lok Dal told the media in a burst of optimism that “we cannot rule out the possibility of mid-term elections” and that the whole idea was to build “a large coalition of like-minded parties”. Telugu Desam's N Chandrababu Naidu was of the opinion that the “so-called national parties were reduced to the level of regional parties” and have “failed to fulfil people's aspirations”, According to him “no national party is in a position to form a government at the Centre without the regional parties' support”. Naidu is convinced that coalition governments have come to stay and regional parties have a major role in supporting them. An active leader in wishing to form a Third Front, is AIADMK's general secretary, J Jayalalithaa who, as of now, cannot even see eye-to-eye with her DMK rival and believes that she can destroy her 'enemy', Karunanidhi at the next elections to the Tamilnadu Legislature.

        Nevertheless she told the media that while a preliminary meeting of some of the regional parties discussed “wide-ranging issues” and there was a general desire to set up a Third Front “we are neither power hungry nor power seekers” but only want to “build a well-knit viable front”. This can be considered the Joke of the Year. If political parties are not power hungry, their leaders would do well to take political sanyas and retire to the Himalayas. Never has hypocrisy been more blatant than at Jayalalithaa's press conference. The bigger Joke is that she hopes “all secular parties would come together in the larger goal of nation-building.

        The truth of the matter is that there is no such thing as a secular party in India, Jayalalitha is a confused leader and is out to confuse the media as well. In any one State there are at best three to four parties in contest and it is usual that only the top two capture anything between 33 to 37 per cent of the votes. The rest of the 30 per cent votes usually got divided between three or four insignificant parties like the CPI or CPM, all of whom are the bane of Indian politics. In the circumstances, the formation of a Third Front means nothing. The fight in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, is primarily between the BSP, BJP and Samajwadi Party and there is nothing that a Jayalalitha can do; in Tamilnadu, the right is between the DMK and AIADMK with the Congress running as a weak third. Where does Mulayam Singh Yadav come in the picture? In the 2007 UP Legislative elections Mayavati revived an unchallengeable majority and she would be hard to displace.

        So where does any other Front make any impact? Jayalalithaa should not fool herself. What a Third Front can do is to decide which of the two leading national parties it will support financially. According to a survey conducted in Uttar Pradesh, political parties spent as much as Rs 700 crore, despite the Election Commission's initiatives to restrain expenditure. The survey noted that Mayavati hardly spent anything on media publicity, its expenditure turning out to be about 10 per cent, while the SP spent four times more. The BJP and Congress spent approximately 35 per cent. The rest was spent by other minor parties. Setting up a Third Front, in the circumstances, has little meaning. And practically all parties are based on communal, caste or ethnic support. Think of the Gujjars and the Meenas and Deras. Not to recognise that fact is only fooling ourselves. A Two Party System to become pro-active, three changes in society need to take place: One, the collapse of the Caste System; two, widespread education with total erasure of illiteracy and three, reducing the percentage of people below-the-poverty-line to near zero. Only a sophisticated society can produce and maintain a two-party system.

        To believe that such a system can become operative in India in the immediate future is to indulge in day-dreaming. When the people as a whole are totally literate, where reservations become a thing of the past, parties like the DMK and the Asom Gana Parishad or the Samajwadi Party will become irrelevant. If presently we are faced with a multi-party system, it is because we are still divided on caste, creed, linguistic and ethnic grounds. These divisions can be wiped out not by talking vainly of secularism but of raising the living standards of the people and wiping out the need for reservations of any kind.

        For that we must put economic growth at the highest level and widest as our top priority. It is when the economic sun shines on all the people all over the country uniformly that a two - party system becomes not just an empty dream but a shining reality. And for that to happen, how long will it take? One more generation? Two? Think it over, ladies and gentlemen. Let us make politics meaningful.