Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall
All the King’s horses and King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again!
This classic nursery rhyme in many ways sums up the story of the ‘thirdfront’, the protagonist of Sanjay Ruparelia’s engaging narrative, Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India. The pioneers in the art of coalition politics at the federal level, the components of the third-front have today gone in different directions and often come together only to separate immediately after that. In this study, Ruparelia explores in elaborate detail the coming together, performance in government and also the unravelling of three third-front federal coalitions, namely the Janata experiment (1977–78), National Front (1989– 1990) and the United Front (1996–98). In each of these coalition formations, the ‘broader Indian Left’ as he prefers to call them played a dominant role in reducing the two polity-wide parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to side actors.