Politics is such uncertain business today that even senior leaders have taken to conducting secret pre-poll surveys in prospective constituencies to assess their chances. Congress Working Committee member Kamal Nath, for instance, hit the panic button after his party lost all the seven Assembly seats in his parliamentary fortress, Chhindwara. He not only had a survey done for his traditional seat, he is believed to have also had five neighbouring constituencies checked out. They are Betul, Balaghat, Seoni, Jabalpur and Hoshangabad. And horror of horrors! The surveyors came back with bad news. The Congress has no hope of winning even one of the six seats, they reported. That leaves Nath without a constituency from which to contest. It’s terrible for a man whose main claim to fame is that he was the only Congress nominee who won in north India during the massive anti-Emergency wave of 1977. Nath isn’t the only one to take recourse to psephology to map his political future. Ambika Soni, who is terribly keen to be elected to the Lok Sabha, is understood to have commissioned a survey in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur, which she considers her hometown. Kapil Sibal, whose Rajya Sabha term is expiring this summer, is said to have sent psephologists out in New Delhi and South Delhi. While Sibal is waiting for the results of his survey, Soni’s, according to the Congress grapevine, has warned her to stay away from Punjab where the party is expected to receive a drubbing this time. Another son rises Another son who’s set to rise in the upcoming elections is former Prime Minister I K Gujral’s scion, Naresh. He’s slated to get a ticket from the Akali Dal to contest from Jalandhar in Punjab. It’s his father’s constituency, from which the senior Gujral won twice. Jalandhar falls into the Akali quota in the seat-sharing arrangement the party has with the BJP. But with a large Hindu population, the Akalis have little hope of getting a Sikh to win from there. Besides which, Naresh is counting on the ‘‘Gujral factor’’ to help him through. These are personal family votes of those who’ve benefited from various projects the senior Gujral set up in the area. There’s a fly in the ointment, however. The Congress and the BSP together command some 30 per cent of the votes. So if there’s a national alliance between these two parties, Naresh could find the going tough. He’s apparently planning to set up residence in Jalandhar for the next few months and not move till the elections are over. Naidu’s date problems The Election Commission is facing a piquant situation with two different sets of requests coming from Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu. When he first dissolved the State Assembly last November, he wrote to the EC asking it to set a date for polls as soon as possible. Last week, he sent another letter which overturns the first one. This one requested that Assembly elections be held simultaneously with Lok Sabha polls. Never mind the delay. The second letter was prompted by fears within the Government that CEC J M Lyngdoh may choose to fire a parting shot before retiring by announcing dates for Andhra elections before the Lok Sabha schedule is finalised. It would have upset Babu’s (and the BJP’s) applecart. Such is the degree of suspicion between the outgoing CEC and the Government that the latter moved post haste to pre-empt any attempt to throw a spanner in the works. ‘Snazzy’ Sinha The Pakistani press seems to be on a honeymoon with Indian leaders these days. After showering Vajpayee with praise, it’s now turned a loving eye on External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha. The Nation, Friday Times and even the Islamabad correspondent of a J&K-based newspaper called Kashmir Images have taken turns in heaping accolades on Sinha. ‘‘Snazzy’’ Yashwant Sinha, is how one paper described him, ending the article with a quip asking why Pakistan couldn’t hire him as Foreign Minister.
