The Hindu : Sonia, Pawar to meet today

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 15, 2004

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Sonia, Pawar to meet today

By Our Special Correspondent

BANGALORE, JAN. 14. The All-India Congress Committee (AICC) spokesman, S. Jaipal Reddy, has expressed the hope that the Congress would be able to enter into an alliance for the Lok Sabha polls with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), led by Sharad Pawar.

Speaking to presspersons here today, Mr. Reddy said that Mr. Pawar had invited the AICC president, Sonia Gandhi, for tea in New Delhi on Thursday. On the senior NCP leader, P.A. Sangma's statement that he preferred an alliance with the NDA, Mr. Reddy said it was an internal matter of that party. The Congress and the NCP are allies in Maharashtra.

On the tie-up with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and other parties in Tamil Nadu, which had been described as "unprincipled" by the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Mr. Reddy said the Justice Jain Commission had faulted the DMK in connection with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi only in its interim report. All references to the DMK had been omitted in the Commission's final report.

It was on the basis of the interim report that the Congress had distanced itself from the DMK.

Mr. Reddy said the Congress would score over the BJP in securing allies. It would be a game of "the hare and the tortoise" and the Congress would be the tortoise. The party had not started its search for allies now; the process had been initiated during the AICC plenary session in Bangalore in March 2001, where a resolution had been adopted calling for adjustments and alliances with like-minded secular political parties. Even prior to that, the Congress had alliances with the Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the NCP in Maharashtra. At the Shimla camp in July 2003, Ms. Gandhi had only reiterated the call.

He said the BJP leaders were harbouring the illusion that they would secure a spectacular victory in the parliamentary elections. He said electoral victories and defeats fell into a cyclical pattern and the Congress, which won the Assembly elections in four northern States in 1998, lagged behind the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections held the following year.

In the recent Assembly elections in those States, the BJP's victory, except perhaps in Madhya Pradesh, was not decisive. Despite the claim of Mr. Vajpayee's popularity, the only other States where the BJP had won Assembly elections after it came to power were Gujarat and Goa.

The Congress was without an ally only in Uttar Pradesh, where it had to choose between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party. Even there, while it had "potential allies," the BJP had none. "The BJP has grown weak in Uttar Pradesh and its support base has eroded."

Mr. Reddy said the BJP "hardly existed" in south India and its presence in Karnataka was "negligible." About his party's prospects in Karnataka, he said the cyclical pattern would not work in the State because of the progressive image of the Congress under the Chief Minister, S.M. Krishna.

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