All eyes on Sonia Gandhi visit today

Withoutnaming either the party or its leader, she had nonetheless torn them apart in an evocative speech in which she said, “The persons who set your homes on fire, were at the same time sitting comfortably inside their own cosy homes without care or concern for your plight. They fed their home fires with your blood. I know that your wounds are still bleeding and it will taken an infinity for those sores to be healed. We have to join hands to defeat these fascist forces to ensure that the madness of those days is never repeated again.”

Whether because of her good showing or otherwise, the Congress, which three years earlier had lost all but one of 34 Assembly seats in the city and won not a single at the next year’s Lok Sabha elections returned three out of six LS candidates in 1998. Its ally the Samajwadi Party lost one seat narrowly and made a good showing in the second, their defeats precipitated only by the presence of Janata Dal candidates in the fray. Even the BJP’s Ram Naik, who was considered formidable,saw his massive margins of previous years eaten up by a relative Congress unknown.

This time round, Congressmen are expecting a sharper message from her to the Sena-BJP. And not even reports of Thackeray’s having approached her for keeping the matter low key through the good offices of a family friend and superstar seem to dishearten them.

The initial dismay in Congress circles at the unofficial reports of Thackeray’s approach to Sonia before the tabling of the report last week, though, has turned into jubilation at the Congress leaders’ sharp reaction to the Commission’s findings and their demands for the State Government’s dismissal. Not forgotten by these Congressmen is the fact of Thackeray’s abuse of Sonia throughout the last election campaign, which the Sena chief denied after the event. This time round, the Congress, which has been accused in the past of going soft on the Sena chief, is determined not to bail him out.

All eyes are thus on Sonia, depending upon her to set the tone for putting theSena-BJP government as well as Thackeray on the mat in the coming weeks without destroying the bridges to various alienated communities that the party has so carefully built in Maharashtra over the past few years.

With a return to the Hindutva rhetoric by the Sena, as evidenced in Manohar Joshi’s responses to the Srikrishna findings, the task before both Sonia and other Congress leaders is delicate: how to gain the confidence of the minorities without alienating the majority community and, most importantly, preventing a Hindutva consolidation by Thackeray once again.