Inside track

Sonia’s speeches are a team effort. The local Congress committees send their inputs on the region being visited to the AICC co-ordination cell which feeds it into a computer and passes it onto her aide V. George for furtherprocessing. Who actually writes the rough draft of the speech is one of the many well-kept secrets of 10 Janpath, with Congressmen even claiming it is the Gandhi family itself.

But the basic speech is written in Hindi and not translated from English as most people assume. The evocative wording with its filmi dialogue — yeh mere suhaag ki bhoomi hai — are largely the handiwork of four men. Madhukant Shukla, a Hindi journalist who is a friend of George and a regular at 10 Janpath, Udayan Sharma, a senior Hindi journalist, Janardhan Dwivedi and S.C. Vats, both AICC joint secretaries.

Three-legged race

A near miss in an election is as good as a mile. The indications are that the BJP and its allies will end up some 35-odd seats short of the magical figure of 271 unless it get its act together in the last lap. The two parties which could bail out the BJP in the post-poll scenario are the DMK and the TDP. Ironically the BJP’s astonishing growth in Andhra Pradesh will ensure that the Congress wins mostof the seats at the expense of the TDP. Will the two Naidus — Chandrababu and Venkiah 00 work out a secret pact depending on the winnability of their respective candidates?

The too-clever-by-half K.N. Govindacharya’s recent description of Jayalalitha as an “aberration”, was perhaps prompted by hopes of mollifying the DMK in the context of a post-poll tie-up. Unlike Sonia, Atal Behari Vajpayee is handicapped in the race by a section of his own party, a motley group of loud-mouths afflicted by the foot-in-the-mouth disease, who rant and rave on TV talk shows oblivious of the fact that they are scoring self-goals for the BJP!

No surrogates

A rumour making the rounds in Delhi is that just before the polls Sonia will spring a surprise by announcing her candidate for prime ministership. As this is the first election where the BJP is more flush with funds than the Congress, the business lobby is being wooed by throwing hints that Manmohan Singh’s name will be declared.

Apart from the fact thatSingh has blotted his copy books by his honest admission that the whole Cabinet was guilty in the Babri Masjid demolition and not just Narasimha Rao, Singh’s selection at this stage would only upset other contenders. Arjun Singh openly countered Singh’s name with the remark that there is no need to make an announcement before the polls.

Actually, most north Indian Congressmen feel more comfortable with N.D. Tewari than Singh. In fact, to boost Tewari’s claim there was even talk of putting him up against Vajpayee in Lucknow. Meanwhile, K. Vijaybhaskara Reddy is biding his time aware that Andhra Pradesh may give the Congress the maximum seats.

Those who talk in terms of Sonia’s nominee for prime ministership are as naive as the veteran political observers who had their mouths wide open in astonishment when Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister within hours of his mother’s death. Sonia’s campaign has been so successful because of the tacit understanding of the general voters, if not the intellectualsof Delhi, that should the Congress secure power at the Centre, then it is obviously Sonia who will hold the reins and no one else. What’s in a name?

It is an intriguing thought. If Feroze Gandhi had been named Feroze Ginwalla or worse still the long winded Sodawaterbottle-opener-wallah — a genuine Parsi surname even if a trifle long-winded — would Indira Gandhi and her offspring have been quite so successful in politics.

By coincidence, Indira Gandhi’s husband happened to have the same surname as the Father of the Nation so that a lot of people in India and abroad assumed that she was not just Pandit Nehru’s daughter but also somehow the inheritor of Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy. Feroze, before his marriage, spelt his surname Ghandy and it was only later that the spelling was changed to Gandhi.