However, it is their instinct for survival, rather than their commitment to the cause of the poor, that has forced the two Yadav chieftains to bury their hatchet. Till the last Lok Sabha elections, they were only too eager to see each other politically dwarfed so that the winner could usurp the entire social justice constituency of the backwards, Dalits and the Muslims in the Hindi heartland. The Rashtriya Janata Dal leader fears that the BJP-ruled Centre is not only determined to dislodge his party's government in Bihar but also hound him by pursuing the fodder scam and other cases against him to their logical end. Mulayam Singh has also realised thelimits of his shrunken fiefdom in Uttar Pradesh, specially after the recent bye-elections. He fears that it would be impossible to dislodge Kalyan Singh's government in UP so long as the BJP calls the shots from Delhi.

To be fair to them, both the Yadavs had made public their pro-Congress inclinations before the installation of the BJP-led government at the Centre. As such, the leaders of the left-over UF should not feign surprise at the formation of the new Front. After all, Laloo Yadav had allied with the Congress in Bihar and tried his best to see the Janata Dal and the Left humbled at the hustings. Short of formally announcing a parting of ways with the UF, Mulayam Singh, too, had made common cause with the Congress by fielding Samajwadi Party candidates against the JD and the communist parties in Uttar Pradesh. By announcing their pact, they have now presented the Left parties with a Hamletian dilemma to be or not to be in the company of the Congress! The Left parties, which emerged as the singlelargest group within the UF after the last Lok Sabha polls, saw themselves as the undisputed leaders of the non-Congress, non-BJP third force. A virtuoso Marxist like Harkishen Singh Surjeet may find a `good boy' like Mulayam Singh deserting the ranks embarrassing. But he will find shaking hands with a scam-tainted Laloo Yadav even more difficult to explain, especially after the Left's no-holds-barred war to uproot his corrupt regime in Bihar.

Given the Congress party's wait and watch attitude and the Left's dilemma, the new Front does not pose any immediate threat to the Vajpayee government. Neither does it mean any accretion to the support base of the RJD and the SP in their respective states. The situation would have been entirely different, at least in UP, if the Bahujan Samaj Party had joined the Front.

But should the ruling BJP's unruly allies get more cantankerous and decide to rock Vajpayee's boat one day, the new Front can provide the nucleus around which a possible non-BJP coalition could beforged in the days to come, both to install another government and to take on the BJP in the electoral arena.