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This is what the Congress will do now...

The BJP completes a full year in office today. I leave it to others, however, to fill out the report cards. Because March 1999 also marked Sonia Gandhi's first anniversary as Congress president. How has the largest opposition party fared under her stewardship? More important, what will be the Congress strategy in the year to come?

"90 per cent of the time a captain doesn't really have to do anything," Geoffrey Boycott once said, "It's the remaining 10 per cent that separates the good ones from the chaff." By that yardstick, you would be hard put to describe Sonia Gandhi as a good captain. She did well enough when the BJP-led government was making mistakes. But the seesawing over Bihar cruelly exposed her limitations.

Now to the more interesting question: what tactics will the Congress employ in the immediate future? In the past 12 months the Congress tried to make the prime minister feel insecure. In the year that is just beginning, I expect that they will try to make Atal Bihari Vajpayee feel jealous.

Let me explain. The Congress wants to bring down the government of course. Previous non-Congress ministries toppled at least partly because of a clash of egos in the ruling party. Charan Singh was instrumental in ending the Janata experiment, Chandra Shekar's ambitions broke the Janata Dal, and Laloo Prasad Yadav succeeded in splitting the party even in the brief United Front era. Each of them was tacitly encouraged by the Congress. Sonia Gandhi, who has never shown any glimpse of originality, sees no reason to move away from those tactics.

So the Congress spent the first year of her reign trying to drive a wedge between the prime minister and the home minister. L K Advani was denounced as 'the face behind the mask,' an ambitious and scheming politician out to unseat the prime minister at the earliest opportunity. Simultaneously, the prime minister was presented as a 'a good man in a bad party', someone trying to fend off the 'hard-liners' operating under the secret instructions of the home minister.

If applied to someone in the Congress, such pronouncements would definitely have been a sentence of death. Ambition is a trait strictly forbidden to any Congress member outside the charmed circle of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Anyone who thinks otherwise should remember the fate of, say, Arjun Singh in the days of Rajiv Gandhi, or take another look at Sharad Pawar today.

However, the prime minister is far too mature, both as a person and as a politician, to be taken in by such silly stories. He calmly ignored them, a display of silent contempt that has gradually disheartened the rumour-mongers. If you ask me, it was always a little silly; after all Vajpayee and Advani have been friends and colleagues since the 1950s -- when little Sonia Maino was still learning to lisp the letters of the Italian alphabet.

So the Congress has changed its tactics. The party still can't think of anything better than making the prime minister and the home minister squabble. But now they will try to make the prime minister envious rather than suspicious.

"Advaniji has his faults," is the new line, "but he is a clean man. There is no scandal attached to him. Have you ever heard of anyone in his family who is involved in a business scandal?" And they will immediately follow this up by levelling allegations about members of the prime minister's family.

The truth of such allegations is irrelevant. From the Congress's limited perspective, it suffices if the prime minister is irritated at such tales. Come to think of it, I am sure there will be rumours that such tales are being leaked by the home minister's friends. Again, it doesn't matter if it isn't true; it adds just the right tough of spice.

It is all a little pathetic really. Rumours apart, what are the issues on which the Congress differs with the government? Does it oppose Pokhran-II, or the attempts to normalise relations with Pakistan, or specific proposals in the Budget? Not really. One year after the Vajpayee ministry assumed office, the only issue where the Congress and the BJP have really faced off is over President's rule in Bihar.

Well, that won't create a rift on the Treasury benches. That leaves Congressmen with just one option: spread a few rumours. And if trying to make the prime minister suspicious fails, try to make him jealous instead.

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