A time when anything can happen, and may

ANYTHING can happen now. We can have a Congress government supported by the Third Front from outside. We can as well have a Third Front government supported by the Congress from outside. We can even have an omnibus Congress-Third Front coalition government. We may see Jayalalitha entering the Third Front and the TMC walking out of it. We may as well see several members from the Samata Party and the Biju Janata Dal desert the now defeated Vajpayee to cross over to the Congress side. We may have Sonia Gandhi as prime minister or somebody else from the Congress like Manmohan Singh, or Shiv Shankar or Purnendu Sangma. If it has to be somebody from outside the Congress, it can very well be Deve Gowda once again. And, if everything and everyone else fails, we may very well see Vajpayee staging a surprise comeback! Let nobody rule that out.

Forming an alternative government is not going to be an easy task for anyone. It is going to be like constituting a cabinet of hornets. If an alternative has to be fashioned out of these so many diverse and different parties, groups and individuals, the Congress' first choice will be to form a government of its own without anybody else in it. Can all of them agree to it? Well, placed as they are in a jam now, Jayalalitha may agree to that and so may Mulayam and Laloo and Moopanar, but will not each one of them want his or her own pound of flesh? If so, how much will the Congress be willing to give or yield, especially when it knows that whatever arrangement it reaches now with them all cannot last for long. Eventually, there has to be an election, sooner than later. In that case, will it want to go to the polls as a failed party.

Even if Sonia or Surjeet are able to gather all the hornets in one nest, will the President agree to install them in office? Will the President want to replace one tenuous coalition with another equally, if not a more, tenuous one? He will certainly want some assurance from them that this time they will not act as they had on other similar occasions in the past, pledging support to one or the other government only to break their pledges within the next few months. Only the other day, Mayawati said on the floor of the House that the BSP is opposed equally both to the BJP and the Congress. Will the President now take her on her word when she goes to him assuring support to an alternative government without herself participating in it? The President is known to be wary of installing minority governments in office with others pledging support from outside. Last time when the Congress had withdrawn support from the Gujral government, the President had on one occasion remarked that he would like to see all partners of a coalition join the government as coalitions supported from outside tended to be unstable. Can he have changed his mind since then?

In such a situation, if an alternative coalition fails to emerge, it may turn out to be advantage Vajpayee. The President in that case will, obviously, ask him to call an election. But, seeing an election ahead of them, those who do not want an early poll may very well change sides or go neutral, turning Vajpayee's present minority of one into a majority. This may look far-fetched but is not beyond the realm of reality.

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