Revival of Ram card driving Cong-SP pact in UP

NEW DELHI: Politics looks set to take a dramatic turn in the cow belt with the Vajpayee government reviving its legal moves to hand over the ‘undisputed’ part of the Ayodhya land to the VHP-led Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas.
Thanks to Ayodhya, it is more than likely that the Mulayam-Sonia understanding —according to which the Congress and Samajwadi Party would jointly fight the Haidergarh and Gouriganj assembly byelections in UP — will not be just a limited mobility pact.Thanks to their extra-sensitive survival instincts, the two leaders have seen through the BJP gameplan. According to sources close to them, both Mulayam and Sonia are convinced that the BJP would, sooner than later, unleash its Hindu card, pushing the NDA agenda onto the back-burner.
In their assessment, almost all the NDA constituents, with the possible exception of the Samata Party and the DMK, wouldn’t cry foul for the simple reason that none of them is in a position to face the electorate alone. The BJP knows their limitation, more so in the aftermath of the Gujarat elections. Should this Hindutva card generate enough passion at the ground level, who knows the Vajpayee government might opt for a snap Lok Sabha poll along with —or soon after —the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Chhatisgarh.
Little wonder then that most of the leaders who matter in the Congress want to say good-bye to the disastrous ‘soft Hindutva’ line this time. And that’s also why these leaders have fallen in line in favour of the politics of alliances with Mulayam in UP, Laloo Yadav in Bihar and Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra.
Now that Mulayam and Sonia have joined hands for all practical purposes, the immediate fallout in UP could be that legislators belonging to the SP and the Congress would, with the help of BJP rebels, try to topple the Mayawati government on the floor of the House when the state assembly meets around the first week of March. On her part, Mayawati, basking in the glory of a Congress split, insists that there is no threat to her government. But the BJP is not so sure. For, it still doesn’t know the precise number of rebels in its ranks.
Those who know Mayawati well say that she is silently preparing for elections with or without the BJP. Thanks to her policies, the BJP vote-bank has shrunk to an all-time low with Thakurs having already moved almost en bloc to the Mulayam camp. All this while, the BSP vote-bank has been becoming stronger by the day. It’s not that the architects of the BJP-BSP coalition experiment don’t know all this. In fact, they know everything. But their problem is that they can do nothing under the circumstances. For, without Mayawati, Mulayam would devour the BJP in UP in the event of a snap poll.
The BJP’s only hope lies in the effective use of the Hindu card. And that’s precisely why the hackneyed Ram temple issue is being pushed into the political battlefield yet again.