Wary of Jaya baggage, Sonia in no hurry

But efforts of mediators to take the Sonia-Jaya meeting beyond the eight-minute tea-party spell have not yielded results as yet. Though Jayalalitha has said that she will meet “political personalities,” Sonia is expected to be in Punjab to participate at a Khalsa tercentenary function at Anandpur Sahib that day. Though she hasn’t got a security clearance so far, a tentative schedule has been drawn up.

Highly placed sources at 10 Janpath say that Sonia’s main worry is how to carry the “excess baggage” immediately though she is not averse to Jayalalitha being an electoral ally in the distant future.

Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy held a 45-minute meeting today with Jayalalitha in Chennai. What transpired between them is not immediately known. But knowledgeable sources say that Jayalalitha is now keen for a dialogue with Sonia. She is reported to have expressed her opposition to the idea of an intermediary. Sonia had initially deputed P Shiv Shanker to talk to her.

The Congress is keen that the government be “exposed thoroughly” in both Houses of Parliament on the Bhagwat and the Mohan Guruswamy issues when it opens on April 15. Jayalalitha’s 18 members should lend their support to the motion under Rule 184 to set up the Joint Parliamentary Committee in the Lok Sabha on the Bhagwat issue. A similar motion would be brought on April 16 itself by the Opposition parties in the Rajya Sabha where they have a majority. Kapil Sibal would open the debate on the Bhagwat issue in the Rajya Sabha and Chairman Krishan Kant has now been left with no option but to accept it.

The Vajpayee government, even after losing the motions on the Bhagwat issue, need not resign. It will suffer humiliation but not an ouster. After registering its victory in both Houses, the Congress wants that the government be allowed to pass the Union Budget with a number of cut motions.

Then, the Congress is expected to ask for another JPC on the steel scandal. The fall of the government, if at all it is to be orchestrated, will be done sometime in May and not in April.

One sign of this came today when the Congress was non-committal on bringing a no-confidence motion against the Vajpayee government despite the RLM coming out openly for the government’s ouster. A final view by the Congress would, however, be taken between April 13-15, sources say.

Meanwhile, there wasn’t much of good news for the BJP today. Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) leader Om Prakash Chautala said he would vote against the government and Tamil Manila Congress leader G K Moopanar also gave no clue of his lending any help to the BJP in Chennai. As Kamal Nath, a hawk in the Congress and member of party’s core group put it: “The BJP’s number game is over. The bottomline is to find a respectable way to quit.”