Days after Union Minister Salman Khurshid said Congress could consider extending support to the Third Front form the government after the Lok Sabha elections, a report on Friday said the party’s leadership is not pleased with the idea.
Besides Khurshid, Ahmed Patel, Prithviraj Chavan, Jairam Ramesh have in the recent past suggested that the party is open to extending its support to a Third Front government. It gave the impression that the Congress is increasingly coming around to the view that it is unlikely to win the 16th General Election on its own and that it may have to work with a Third Front to stop the BJP from coming to power. While not all Congress leaders are willing to say so in public yet, in private the view has been doing the rounds for at least a couple of months.
However, a newspaper today reported that senior party functionaries, including a minister, say Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi would choose to sit in the opposition rather than “stitch up a government with the help of multiple parties”.
“Such a formation has not been successful in the past. An element of instability always remains,” the newspaper quoted one functionary on condition of anonymity.
The report has further quoted another Congress functionary as saying that Rahul has told office-bearers that he would make “structural changes” in the organisation after the elections. “His priority remains rebuilding the organisation, especially in states where the Congress has lost its support base to regional forces. We expect a complete overhaul of the party after the elections,” the daily quoted the source as saying.
Admitting that a Third Front government cannot come to power without support from the Congress, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) is actively working towards the victory of candidates belonging to non-National Democratic Alliance (NDA), non-United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalitions, a well placed CPI-M source told a news agency.
Nisar Ul Haq, the professor of political science at Jamia Milia Islamia, felt a Third Front would come into picture only if the NDA failed to cross the tally of 230 seats.
BJP leader Arun Jaitley has dismissed the probability of a Third Front government after the Lok Sabha election, calling its constituents “merchants of instability”.