What is the Congress about to gain from the current crisis? Remember the Ides of March, 1998? The BJP and the Congress had emerged as the two largest parties, in that order. Smaller parties were rallying aro-und these two columns. Chandrababu Naidu of the TDP was weighing his options. If the Congress agreed not to acco-mmodate in the cabinet leaders like Vij-aybhaskar Reddy and others from Andhra Pradesh who had fought him tooth and nail, Naidu could well have gone along with the anti-BJP combine.The then Congress President, Sitaram Kesri, along with senior Congress leaders, met the President and asked for time. Anxious Congressmen rushed to Sonia Gandhi.She must take over as party president or else the wily old Kesri would form a government with the support of the likes of Laloo Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav and all the elegant Congress leaders would be left sucking their thu-mbs. That is when the coup was staged. Within hours Kesri's name plates were removed from the Congress office. SoniaGandhi was installed as party president.Understandably, her line was exactly the opposite of what Kesri would have done: no coalitions and certainly not with the likes of Laloo and Mulayam. The Co-ngress had to be revived, particularly in UP, where the party did not win a single seat in spite of her exertions. Salman Khurshid was despatched to UP to wean away the Muslim votes from Mulayam, identified as the man in occupation of the traditional Congress turf.At the Panchmarhi session the "no-coalition" line was susta-ined. The line made political sense for the ensuing elections in Madhya Pradesh, Raj-asthan and Delhi where it was a direct Cong-ress-BJP fight. No co-alitions were required. From this particular experience a general principle was coaxed: the Congress would reco-ver its elan on its own. Coalitions were messy. But if the Co-ngress insisted on abiding by this golden dictum, the BJP-led coalition could last for years. Was the Congress prepared for this without being blamed for being in cahootswith the BJP?A clever mantra was devised: the party would not destabilise the present government but if the combine "fell under the weight of its own contradictions, the Congress would fulfill its constitutional obligations".The November elections to the three states were not so much a victory for the Congress as the trouncing of the BJP by the electorate for gross mismanagement: the metaphor for this mismanagement were onion prices.Then something happened. The Prime Minister's bus journey to Lahore, the collapse of onion prices, prospects of a bumper crop, the impressive anniversary celebrations, began to impart to the Vajpayee apparatus an air of respectability, even tho-ugh George Fernandes emerged in bold relief as the government's most embarrassing co-mponent.And now the current political crisis has imposed upon Sonia Gandhi choices she is not prepared for. She exemplified disdain for power via the route of messy coalitions.What was the mindset behind this "I shall never get into messycoalitions"? Did she really visualise a day when the Congress would come back with an absolute majority? Surely this is a pipe dream? UP, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal together account for over 200 seats where the Congress is a cypher. By no stretch of the imagination can the party extract an absolute majority from the remainder 350 seats. In other words, there is no escape from coalitions.One school of thought (within her own party, incidentally) maintains that the prospect of heading a coalition government unnerves her because she would not know how to cope with a Laloo in the cabinet or a Surjeet out of it. She has still not graduated from the amateurish spell of reading out speeches in public functions. The second most important leader in the world's largest democracy has not granted a single interview to the media. Not a single full-fledged press conference has she addressed. These are not signs of a self-assured leader who has the intellect or training to manage a diverse coalition.It can beargued, from her personal point of view, that if the path to prime ministership is paved with obvious difficulties, what is wrong with marking time as the second most important leader in the country until she finds herself better equipped? A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.So, what does she do now? Lead a coalition? Her possible hesitations on this choice have already been indicated above. Invite the ablest Congress leader to head the coalition? This would be the best course for the party but the idea is a non-starter because dogs in mangers would not allow that to happen. Once a person becomes prime minister he cannot be trusted to vacate.What suits her temperament is that the obsequious, fawning Congress Working Committee be transformed into the Union cabinet. In other words, lead a Congress government supported by others from the outside. But this exposes her to the risk of being pulled down by those supporting the government. They will choose the time for bringing her down.If she heads acoalition now, she may be in better drill for post-election coalitions from which there is no escape.
