Third Front on the Podium?

The Indian Political scene has already warmed up to the impending General Elections. As it looks increasingly possible that neither the UPA nor the NDA will muster enough numbers to form a government in the centre - the Third Front has been creating much ruckus. The Third Front projecting itself as a secular non-BJP, non-Congress alternative formally took shape after a meeting at Tumkur near Bangalore recently. But I am extremely confident that the third front is not a viable alternative at all. Simply put, it is just an alliance of convenience by a number of the regional parties - an alliance without a central leadership, without any manifesto and without any direction and clue who will be with whom after the elections. That is exactly the reason why players like Mayawati of the BSP, Naveen Patnaik of the BJD, Jayalalitha of the AIADMK etc. have not sided with the third front yet. Already political commentators have raised the point that the front will break up when the question of prime ministership will be raised. If hypothetically the third front by some miracle garner enough votes to stake a claim to the centre and if a concensus Prime Minister is decided upon, will the government survive for long? My hunch is a big no. Just pan back to 1977 when all cards were highly touted against the Congress following the acrimony of the emergency - there was a very strong reason for all non-Congress parties to come together to protect the Indian democracy. Together they did come - the Socialist Party, Jana Sangh, Bharatiya Lok Dal and Congress (O) and came to power with Morarji Desai as the Prime Minister. Yet, the coalition collapsed and could not last through the entire 5 year term. The same story repeated in 1989 when the Third Front of that time came to power with VP Singh and later Chadrashekhar as the Prime Ministers and collapsed by 1991. Unfortunately another attempt by the non-Congress, non-BJP parties to form the government in 1996 gave way to the formation of the United Front government under the hitherto unknown Deve Gowda who was followed by I.K. Gujral as the Prime Minister and the country again went to polls in 1998. Even in 1977 when the wave was strongly against the Congress(I) and there was a purpose for unity amongst the non-Congress parties - the Janata Dal coalition could garner only less than 300 seats and did not last the entire term. In 2009 - when the polity is far more fragmented and when there is no real ideological factor uniting the parties of the Third Front what can we expect from them?
My argument is that the Third Front is unfortunately just not big enough to garner enough numbers to stake claim to a stable government in the centre.The power equations are too complex for any meaningful middleground to be reached and I see the Third Front just as a parade of potential coalition partners for either the Congress or the BJP. Except for the Left parties, there isn't any party that swears by any ideology in the Third Front - so inevitably after the elections they will take the best offer at hand, for they will have no other choice - power is afterall the best aphrodisiac as Kissinger once said!