BJP, SP in a tacit deal, feels Congress

Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's recent decision to get his party to contest 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh has deepened the conviction in the Congress that the party has struck a tacit deal with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and could go so far as to help the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) form a government at the Centre if the NDA falls slightly short of the 272 mark in the forthcoming Lok Sabha.

BJP leader Pramod Mahajan is in touch with the Samajwadi Party, Congress leaders say.

It is at his prompting that the Samajwadi Party has set up so many candidates in Madhya Pradesh, who are unlikely to win but will certainly damage Congress chances in these constituencies, they say.

Congress leaders cite evidence to show the close relationship between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party. The Samajwadi Party candidate against Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lucknow, for instance, was put up without fully exploring the possibility of a joint candidate.

Madhu Gupta, Samajwadi Party candidate, has said in her public speeches that she respects the Prime Minister from the bottom of her heart and will never speak against him. She says she is standing against Vajpayee only because she agrees with the Samajwadi Party's ideology.

The Samajwadi Party has set up a candidate in Kanpur, against a sitting Congress MP. That the candidate is a Muslim, Haji Mushtaque Solanki, makes it clear that all he will do is divide the Congress vote.

Similarly, the Samajwadi Party candidate in Rae Bareli is a Thakur, Ashok Singh, in a constituency where traditionally, Thakurs have always voted for the Congress, and will now be torn between loyalty to a party and loyalty to their caste. Sonia Gandhi is contesting from Rae Bareli.

In Pratapgarh, another Thakur-dominated constituency, which is held by Ratna Singh of the Congress, the Samajwadi Party has fielded Akshay Pratap Singh, till recently detained under POTA and a cousin of Raghuraj Pratap Singh, known as Raja Bhaiyya.

The story gets a peculiar twist in Maharashtra. In Mumbai, the Samajwadi Party has put up a candidate against Murli Deora's son Milind, a Mukesh Ambani lookalike. Observers in the party put this down to corporate warfare because of Murli Deora's closeness to one faction of a corporate family, the other faction of which is close to Samajwadi Party leaders.

No one has been fielded against Congress MP Sunil Dutt because of his son Sunjay Dutt's associations with the film world. This will mean a straight contest between Sunil Dutt and Sanjay Nirupam (Shiv Sena) whom the Samajwadi Party has vowed to defeat.

At a public meeting in Uttar Pradesh over the weekend, Mulayam Singh Yadav said the Samajwadi Party's political options were open and would remain so until the results of the poll. He did not disagree with a questioner that the Samajwadi Party could support the NDA if the need arose, but only clarified that development, not the foreign origins of a leader, was the central theme in the Lok Sabha elections.