Sonia gets friendly

When Manmohan Singh went to Chennai to seal a ‘‘new relationship of trust and confidence’’
between Sonia’s Congress and Karunanidhi’s DMK. Will Congress watchers and political commentators look back at this moment as a significant milestone in the career of the Congress party. A suggestion of reinvention even, at a time when the party knows it must change to succeed, survive? Or will it be remembered as a day in the life of a panic stricken party, flailing about for strategy? As the Congress draws up a brand new road map to elections in a CWC meet, and gets it off the ground by promptly stitching up a ‘‘progressive front’’ with the DMK in Tamil Nadu, shrugging away past hostility and one Jain Commission Report, it’s time to ask what the suddenly hectic commotion in the Congress camp really signifies.

The Congress has struck alliances before. But the pact special emissary Manmohan Singh has sewn up in Tamil Nadu on Thursday could be different. This time, it seems part of a larger strategy of alliance-making consciously crafted to take on the BJP-led NDA. The party that has all along refused to accept that the rules of the game have changed, seems to have dropped all its hauteur and all its disclaimers, to take the plunge. Over the past few days, Sonia Gandhi has done things she hasn’t done before, or at least hasn’t been seen to do before. In quick succession, she has driven out of 10 Janpath to call on leaders of the Opposition, she has telephoned them, solicited their support, and in each case, she has disarmingly kept the media informed. We now know she talked to Ram Vilas Paswan, tried to connect to Mayawati, spoke to Karunanidhi before sending Singh to Chennai, and will soon talk to ‘‘Sharad Pawarji’’. This newly daring, newly adventurous Sonia is armed with a CWC-stamped blueprint that insists on a ‘‘secular front’’ before the month is done. It is also a blueprint unafraid to mimic the BJP as it puts new emphasis on forming election management committees, and speaks of parachuting senior leaders to micromanage election campaigns in the states.

So is Sonia’s Congress finally doing what party watchers have long been exhorting it to? In this first flush, it may seem so. But the test of the Congress’s new political savvy will lie not just in the seat-sharing arrangements closer to the polls, though given its all-India spread that will be a daunting enough task. The real test will lie in also forging and then selling a common programme of the new front. If the Congress worries about a Sonia versus Atal election, as it probably should, it must find the political will to shed its ambiguities on policies and force its new partners to do the same. To be an alternative, the new front demands more than just some dexterity with poll numbers.