An insurance policy called Sonia

Most political leaders consider themselves utterly fortunate if they can become indispensable to one political party. Sonia Gandhi has achieved the impossible. She has become indispensable to two political parties. The Congress as well as the BJP.

Fourteen Congress chief ministers gathered in Guwahati with the singular purpose of singing hosannas to their choice of heir to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. On the other side of India, in Goa, Vajpayee took up the challenge and opened the campaign for the next general election. Take my word for it. His gamble was protected by insurance.

The BJP's insurance policy is called Sonia Gandhi.

The BJP has dared its allies in the National Democratic Alliance to break ranks and join a coalition with Sonia Gandhi. An alliance with the Congress would be easy for most of the partners of the ruling NDA. Old enmities have melted in the heat of new fires.

Let Sonia Gandhi mention today that she is not interested in becoming prime minister and in less than a week there will be either a different BJP or an alternative coalition in power in Delhi.

After Gujarat, even George Fernandes' Samata Party would split if Fernandes remained loyal to the BJP in such circumstances. But the BJP knows that the prime ministership is a non-negotiable item on Sonia Gandhi's agenda. She would much prefer Vajpayee to remain prime minister if she cannot get the job herself.

That was Sonia Gandhi's obstinate insistence in the old dark days of "272" (you have to lisp that to get it right). The confidence behind that itch has increased with 14 states in the Congress fold. So the BJP can sit back and watch its partners in power squirming around a paradox: the stronger Sonia Gandhi feels, the weaker she actually gets.

Is this aversion to Sonia Gandhi personal? If it is, it is wrong. People in public life have to learn that they must keep their personal likes and dislikes outside the realm of decisions. A personal view must, or at least should, surrender to the larger need.

Why should, therefore, potential allies of the Congress make Sonia Gandhi into an issue; why not leave it to the Congress to decide whom it wants as leader? Why should any other Congress leader, whether Manmohan Singh or Digvijay Singh or P.V. Narasimha Rao be acceptable as a future prime minister, but not Sonia Gandhi?

The answer is simple. Because she is not of Indian origin. She is an Italian. A passport, acquired fairly late in life, and much after it could have been done, does not make you an Indian.

Her daughter Priyanka is an Indian, but not Sonia. Each time both speak they prove this. Sonia Gandhi does not know a single Indian language; more categorically, she does not think in Indian.

I am sure you understand precisely what I am saying. Her Hindi is a laboured joke; she has to read out speeches because Hindi does not come naturally to her. One dreads the thought of her becoming conversational in Hindi; mispronunciation can lead to very dangerous self-parody.

What does she think she is going to do as prime minister? Speak to Indians in a kind of English that even the English would consider foreign?

While we should not make more out of this than necessary, it remains pertinent that in her preferred province, Uttar Pradesh, Sonia Gandhi lost in her own constituency, Amethi, during the last Assembly elections, in which the BJP got hammered.

The Muslim minority

The origins of Sonia Gandhi would have been a problem for the Congress even in the usual circumstances of Indian politics, if the national debate had been over issues of bread, butter and circus, the three great themes of democracy.

But the BJP, now fully led by its leader Vajpayee, has switched the debate. The question today is where the country stands over its minority Muslim population. That is the challenge thrown before every political leader, every political party, and every Indian. That is what the next general election will be fought on.

Those who think the answer can be written in black and white fool themselves.

The wisest of India's political leaders Jawaharlal Nehru appreciated the complexity only after he had been defeated in his passionate quest to preserve the unity of India from the divisive rhetoric of the Muslim League.

There are sleeping passions everywhere; which spark will light up which corner of the mind and the heart (the heart can be more dangerous than the mind, when it becomes vengeful) is an open question.

The biggest challenge is obviously before the Indian National Congress because it claims to believe in all three of the words that make up its name.

It must decide on a critical point: is Sonia Gandhi an asset or a liability for the party in this debate? Can an Italian with extremely limited resources in the Hindi language and syntax meet this great challenge? Can Sonia Gandhi campaign in Gujarat beyond making set-piece speeches from 30 feet above the crowd?

The Gujarat elections will be in June. Is Sonia Gandhi the right person for the Congress in this confrontation?

This is a moment, I believe, although I can only depend on a hunch rather than evidence, when even a Jawaharlal Nehru might have thought of stepping aside for a Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, if Patel could carry the Congress argument more convincingly. But in order to think like that you have to place the country's interests above your own.

The BJP is confident that Sonia Gandhi will never do that. That is the BJP's insurance policy. So far Sonia Gandhi has been taunting the BJP with the prospect of elections. After Goa, the BJP is taunting Sonia Gandhi with an election date, not just in Gujarat but also in the country.

The BJP would have been much more reluctant to take on a Congress led by Narasimha Rao in such a debate. I have been Rao's worst critic since December 1992; I do not need a lesson in his inadequacies.

But the situation is qualitatively different now. It is the Raos, Chandrashekhars, Deve Gowdas, V.P. Singhs, Manmohan Singhs, Chandrababu Naidus, Karunanidhis and Arjun Singhs who have to claim the country from the BJP in the court of the Indian people.

For that is where the future of India will be decided: in the minds of the Indian people, and particularly in the minds of Indians who are Hindus.

The battle has to be at many levels. A Narasimha Rao could even form an alternative coalition in this Parliament, and turn the Lok Sabha into what it should be on occasion, the court of the people for the people. Sonia Gandhi's staccato phrases in an unfamiliar idiom will not serve.

The Congress needs a leader who can think on his feet, not one whose thoughts have been written out for her in large type. No Congressman will tell her this, but the thought of Sonia Gandhi as prime minister interferes with an Indian's notions of self-respect.

Indian Muslims are today shattered by Vajpayee's speech in Goa. Part of the reason is that they were comforted by that analogy of the mask.

As Prime Minister Vajpayee made that mask into a strategy and a policy, placing himself in between the Hindutva passions that flared up repeatedly in his own ranks; to use an analogy, he saw himself as the mortal Shiva who had to drink t