Hope floats for the BJP

MANDATE 2004

As Andhra Pradesh rocked, BJP received a jolt. The party leadership wore a taciturn look after a 70-day blitzkrieg campaigning.

At the party's headquarters on Ashok Road, preparations were on for the day of the counting of votes. Television sets were being installed in the media room to keep track of trends all day long.

Most party leaders, still in shock over the Andhra results, were playing truant when it came to attending office.

Not surprisingly, most leaders showed their availability for the earlier time slots rather than later.

The number-crunching after the Andhra debacle has also spawned a new BJP theory, that 272 is actually not the magic number of majority in Parliament.

According to a senior leader, "Deve Gowda and Nitish Kumar are contesting two seats, they will have to vacate one, Chhapra poll has been countermanded, the BJP candidate in Gonda died just after poll, so there will be a bypoll there, and Chandrasekhara Rao and A (Tiger) Narendra have fought both Assembly and Lok Sabha.''

So the new magic number? 269 seats. Somehow, the logic didn't seem to reassure the rest of the party. Some state leaders also arrived at the Central office to gauge the mood within the party.

Said one candidate, a former minister from Madhya Pradesh, "things are very different in Madhya Pradesh, I cannot believe the tension at the Central office."

However, the most difficult job in the world on Wednesday was surely that of guest co-ordinators for various television channels.

With Arun Jaitley having expressly stated that he would not be available to any television channel for "bytes and nibbles", the issue of getting suitable guests for a round-the-clock TV coverage was an even bigger suspense than Thursday's results.

Even the usually dependable Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Prakash Javadekar apeared to be spread thin between various television channels. "This is all I can do for you, please book your own leaders," said a harried BJP office bearer in-charge of fixing time slots.