Sonia overcomes nerves, to take oath tomorrow

Left Front, Samajwadi Party not to join government.

Sonia Gandhi will meet President APJ Abdul Kalam tomorrow morning to stake claim to become Prime Minister a day after she was on the verge of reconsidering taking the job.

The day brought some setbacks for her, as the Left parties announced they would support the government but not participate in it and the Samajwadi Party echoing this view.

Gandhi was already upset by this. But by mid-afternoon, some of the allies got calls from Gandhi, including the Left parties and the Laloo Prasad Yadav-led Rashtriya Janata Dal, that she wanted to meet them.

When Yadav reached 10 Janpath, sources said, he was taken aback when she conveyed the decision that she had changed her mind about the prime ministership and would like someone else from the party to take the job.

Yadav was joined at 10 Janpath by Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Sitaram Yechury and senior Congress leaders. Gandhi said she was upset by the Bharatiya Janata Party's campaign on her foreign origins. She became emotional about the diatribe launched by Uma Bharati, Govindacharya and Sushma Swaraj that they were contemplating resigning from their posts in protest against her "foreign-ness". She was disturbed that her becoming prime minister could lead to people immolating themselves. "I don't want to be a liability on the government even before it has taken over," she is quoted by one of the allies as having said.

Yadav and Yechury, recognising that this was an emotional reaction, said they would not accept anyone as the leader of the alliance but Gandhi. Yadav recalled all the charges the Opposition had levelled against him and said if he had wilted then, he would never have recovered.

Gandhi's children, Priyanka and Rahul, also told her not to give in to the BJP's "viciousness". Congress general secretaries Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ambika Soni, along with Pranab Mukherjee and Manmohan Singh, were with her for some time, trying to persuade her that stepping down from the prime ministership would only reinforce the BJP's arguments.

Finally, Mukherjee and Singh announced that Gandhi had been invited by Kalam to form the government, that the "rumours" had been proved wrong and that she would stake claim tomorrow. She is likely to be sworn in on Wednesday.

Pledging complete "outside" support to a Gandhi-led government at the Centre, the Left Front, which has over 60 MPs, said it would not be in a position to get its policies implemented and did not want the entire Opposition space to be taken by "rightist" forces.

"While extending support from outside, the Left parties will ensure that any machinations by the BJP and communal forces to destabilise the government are foiled," leaders of the CPM, CPI and the All-India Forward Bloc told a joint press conference after an over hour-long meeting here.

Observing that the common minimum programme will be the test of the new government, CPM General Secretary Harkishen Singh Surjeet, his CPI counterpart AB Bardhan and Forward Bloc leader Debabrata Bhattacharya said "the policy direction of the new government is going to be determined with the formulation of the common minimum programme".