UNITING ANTIBJP PARTIES WON’T BE EASY FOR SONIA
Aday after Sonia Gandhi broke bread with leaders of anti-BJP parties, her move to assemble them on one platform found resonance in the bypolls in two key north Indian states: Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The signal from the voters was unmistakable: hang together or get hanged separately. The ground also seems ripe for anti-BJP line-ups if one factors in the latter’s growing temperamental disconnect with smaller allies. Symptomatic of that is the TDPinspired no trust move .
But can Sonia pull it off? A veteran now, she was a neophyte 19 summers ago when she first ventured to set up an alternative to AB Vajpayee. The events of April 1999 left her red faced for failing to muster the magical 272 after dislodging the NDA by one vote. The Samajwadi Party, then led by Mulayam Singh, did not play ball. The embarrassment was as much that of the CPI(M)’s Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who took Mulayam at his word to convey the assurance of the SP’s support to the Congress through Arjun Singh.
An honest broker, the Marxist veteran had struck a rapport with Sonia at a one-on-one meeting they had at his Teen Murti Lane bungalow. He had then shared with me details of their talks: “She came all alone on a languid afternoon. I said I’ve one air-conditioner and that’s in my bedroom. As she’s like my daughter, we could sit there and talk.” Surjeet used the meeting to allay her party’s apprehensions of the Left insisting on difficult-to-meet conditions: “I said a few thousand crore rupees for anti-poverty schemes would give us justification for backing the government…and she’d get her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi’s pro-poor image.”
But he erred in believing Mulayam whom he should have known better. The SP leader had gained political respectability from the Left’s companionship. Surjeet, in fact, tried to make him the PM when the Congress withdrew support to HD Deve Gowda in 1997. The move was scuttled by VP Singh and Chandrababu Naidu, who worked in tandem to build a consensus
NEWS OF THE WEEK
MARCH 19: The 47-day-old Congress-backed Soshit Dal Ministry, headed by Mr B. P. Mandal, was voted out of office by a margin of 17 votes in the Bihar Assembly today (March 18) on a no-confidence motion moved by the United Opposition Front.