According to the hairy ball theorem, there is no way one can smooth down all the hair on a hairy ball. Somewhere, at least one hair will stand out. A Jayalalitha there or a Mulayam here. It is no fault of one or the other. It was all there in the script written for them. The roles were cut for them and they for the roles. This was a play where everybody had to take his or her comic revenge on the other. Now, we are through with the last act which has ended with a knife in every actor's back.

What now? Another mid-term election, of course. This is because while Sonia Gandhi has failed to muster a majority, the Vajpayee-led coalition still remains a minority of one. It is still possible that, fearing a election, some members may cross sides to lend numbers to Vajpayee but there is no way the President will agree to give him another chance.

So, on to the election now. This must be held within six months, that is, before the end of October. For the BJP, calling an election at the earliest, say, in June-end may be better because it can then go to the polls with the wound inflicted by Jayalalitha still fresh in the public mind. It can then hope to cash in on the sympathy which Jayalalitha's betrayal has generated in certain sections of voters. He is at the moment at the peak of his popularity and that will certainly yield him some electoral benefit.

At the moment, it is advantage BJP as both the Congress and the so-called third front have suffered a big loss of case in this crisis. They can both argue that the crisis was not caused by them but by the BJP's own ally, but they have sullied their hands by having joined hands with Jayalalitha. This is commonly seen as an unnecessary crisis, one without an issue, generated only to play with the polity, only to cause political instability. Even all this might have been excused had they been able to form an alternative government by hook or by crook . But here they have brought down a government without even having first worked out what they are going to do afterwards. This is seen as a purely negative act, a crass instance of politics of negativism.

This will certainly benefit the BJP and allies, though it is difficult to estimate how much. The crisis has already benefitted the BJP inasmuch as it has made the BJP alliance firmer than before, while the third front has become defunct and the third from's relations with the Congress have been utterly destroyed, for the time being at least. This time while the BJP will go to the polls at the head of a strong alliance of proven mutual trust, the Congress will have to go alone with no third front anywhere in sight. Try as he still may, Surjeet cannot hope to revive and resurrect the third front. Sonia Gandhi may forge local alliances with the likes of Jayalalitha, Laloo Yadav and Kanshi Ram. That will, however, hurt her main appeal. She wants to ask voters to end the coalition raj by giving the Congress an absolute majority of its own. How will she do that, if she herself joins hands with all these parties. She will at best have a coalition against a coalition. There is little chance that the next election will give us a clearer verdict than before but there is a chance that the next coalition may be firmer and last longer because polarisation of parties is now more definitive.