The Left may be Mamata Banerjee’s sworn enemy number one but that has not stopped the West Bengal chief minister from taking a lesson from the former’s favourite page: cobbling together a non-Congress, non-BJP third front.

So having dumped the UPA at the centre, and in turn dumped by the Congress at the state level, Banerjee is now opening talk channels to rope in more regional parties like her own Trinamool Congress to join the new bandwagon. On Tuesday, Banerjee said she had spoken to Odisha and Bihar chief ministers Naveen Patnaik and Nitish Kumar, respectively, as also to former Jharkhand CM Babulal Marandi on formation of a "federal front”.

She also met Janata Dal (United) leader KC Tyagi at her office in Kolkata on Tuesday, "We are looking at a third front. Let's see what happens,” she told reporters after the meeting with Tyagi.

While Patnaik, an erstwhile ally of the BJP-led NDA, has indicated to different sections of the media of late about the launch of a third front, the JD(U), Banerjee’s hope for the big catch in the probable alliance, is yet to sever its ties with the BJP and the NDA.

The third front, the baby of Indian politics that has been aborted on several occasions earlier, was delivered a stillborn over the last couple of decades. Most non-Congress and non-BJP political leaders have toyed with the idea at one point or the other since the VP Singh-led coalition showed the way, and sowed the seeds, in 1989. And while most coalitions minus the two major parties have had short stays at the Centre, the situation is no different in the states.

In fact, Congress, the junior partner in the anti-Left alliance in West Bengal, had begun complaining about Banerjee’s Big Didi attitude within months of the alliance dethroning the Left Front and assuming power at Writers’ Building in Kolkata in the summer of 2011. The state Congress’s grumblings began much before Trinamool Congress’s grumblings with UPA-2.

And that has always been the problem with most fronts, barring perhaps the Left Front in Bengal and Kerala, in Indian politics. While Maharashtra, too, had been slightly different from the examples in other states, with both the Congress-NCP and the Shiv Sena-BJP alliances surviving through thick and thin over the years, the former has begun to show signs of discomfiture of late.

In the national context, another problem, as the Left comrades would tell Banerjee, is the flit-footed nature of most regional parties. Fair-weather friends, most of them tend to snuggle up and find comfort in the warmth of one of the big parties. So in her heroic effort to stitch together a non-Congress/non-BJP alliance, and stitch up her own image as a national leader, the TMC supremo could well be looking at empty chairs next to her after the general elections if she is eyeing the likes of Samajwadi party, Bahujan Samajwadi Party, DMK, AIADMK, and YSR Congress in this proposed “regional front”.

Banerjee, though, could well be making a fruitless effort if she is eyeing to cobble together the front without these biggies – frankly, the number of Lok Sabha seats in ‘regional parties’ of the other states are too marginal to get the front anywhere close to government formation. Interestingly, several of these biggies have been on stage in other earlier efforts to stitch together a third front, notably by the Left and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), a sort of nonentity at present.

And as the comrades could again tell Banerjee – if she gives her the chance, that is – the flight could be faster before you check whether the adjacent seat had been warm.