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Way to go, Sonia!

The recently concluded assembly election has put paid to many political fallacies, not the least of which is the putative invincibility of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Hindi belt. A few other political misbeliefs that have bit the dust in the cool climes of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi are that the anti-incumbency factor spares no government (ask Digvijay Singh about it); that women lack in winnability (ask Shiela Dikshit about it); people vote with their heart, not their brain or stomach (need anything be said on this?).

But, in my opinion the biggest fallacy that has met its Waterloo concerns Sonia Gandhi, who has finally, thanks to some savvy decisions, sealed her place as the Congress president. Conventional wisdom so far had it that she was an aberration who lacked political wisdom -- this had more to do with her origins than anything else -- and who had, after years of hemming and hawing, taken to the rough and tumble of politics with one single aim: to defend her family against the Bofors stigma.

Like most, I too shared some, maybe not all, of these misgivings about Sonia Gandhi, and continue to harbour grave concern over the possibility of a foreign-born who still stutters through Hindi after decades of living in India, ascending the country's highest political office. But even that does not restrain me from admitting that finally, Sonia Gandhi has come into her own.

I am not referring merely to the fact of the election victory, for not all the credit for it should be laid at her door. Certainly, as the commander-in-chief of the party, she has managed to do what at least two of her predecessors could not do: imbue the Congress party with a sense of confidence that they can once again win elections.

Quite a substantial part of the Congress's showing in the Hindi heartland, from where it was all but wiped out some years ago, needs to be attributed to the death-wish of the BJP that had forgotten the most basic lesson in politics: that the people have no time for grandiose schemes if their fundamental needs -- roti, kapda aur makaan, say some, pyaj says the Congress party -- are not being provided for.

Ram clearly cannot be prayed to on an empty stomach, the BJP's erstwhile voters have warned the party, but maybe it will ignore this as it has brushed aside so many other warnings.

And even Sonia Gandhi has not hesitated to admit that within her party, the credit for the tremendous showing should go to her lieutenants on the field, judging by the fact that she took no time to reward them with the top post in the states, when the respective legislature parties passed the buck to her.

This is a new-look Congress party, one that seems to have emerged from the slumber and the sloth of the past and is serious about doing battle for the prime position it had lost.

What particularly impresses me about Madame Gandhi is that she has refused to be swept away by all the euphoria surrounding her. With victory come the usual panegyrists, who could present a picture of alternative reality, and a callow soul could easily mistake that for the truth, as Rajiv Gandhi did in the honeymoon of 1985. Sonia, however, has shown that she means business.

Surprisingly, quite a few in her party, despite their long innings in the service of the nation, have forgotten the primer that victory and defeat are as inevitable as night and day in a political party's life. The choice is one's own, to either confine the lifespan to a day, like the tsetse fly, or to continue like the banyan tree. Sonia has left no one in doubt about what her intentions are.

Of course, given that Congressmen's existence has so far revolved around power and devising ways and means of retaining it, the pressure on Sonia Gandhi to depose the A B Vajpayee government and step into the void must be tremendous. Not only her own partymen, but even assorted messiahs of the downtrodden from the Opposition ranks, who have built their careers on anti-Congressism, have been urging her daily to deliver the coup de grace. There seems to be no dearth of queen-makers in India in New Delhi, and Sonia, criticised for her lack of savvy, has refused to run with the baton.

She has obviously read the assembly election results right, and realises that the best thing for the Congress party would be the continuance of the Vajpayee government. Eight months of dithering have turned the voters away from the BJP and towards the Congress so much that even a state government that was written off on the eve of polling scored an impressive win thanks to the Centre's bungling on such a simple issue as the onion crisis. And only a fool would allow the fall of such a government. Now all that Sonia Gandhi needs to do is sit back, and watch the BJP's petrified allies walk out of the government and into her camp, on her own terms.

That's only part of the reason for Sonia Gandhi's diffidence to hastening the demise of the Vajpayee government. Even if the Congress party were to work the present arithmetic in the Lok Sabha to its advantage, Sonia Gandhi has realised that her party has won only the battle, not the war. And that will be fought not in the airconditioned splendour of Parliament House, but in the rough and unfriendly terrain of the Hindi heartland, notably Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The signs are already encouraging for the Congress party. The recent election results have shown that its traditional vote bank, who had meandered away after December 6, 1992, are trudging back, fed up with the quick fixes that glib politicos have been handing out to them. The result to the Bharuch by-poll showed that when it comes to a highly charged, communalised election, the minority vote is not enough to bail out the Congress, not when the majority community is plumbing for the BJP, but luckily the rest of the country has not gone the Bharuch way. The outcome of the Agra by-poll must be particularly heartening for the Congress, with it edging out the Samajwadi Party for the second place. The latter, in fact, lost its deposit.

The BJP has for long harped on the "finals" yet to be played. Assuming that the recent elections were the semi-finals, there is little doubt who is the odds-on favourite, not when the BJP is hell-bent on handing out a walkover.

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Saisuresh Sivaswamy