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	Virendra Kapoor

December 23, 2002

	Think again if you think Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati is passé. Agreed the lady's Bahujan Samaj Party-Bharatiya Janata Party ruling coalition is in a minority right now, but chances are she will prove her majority in the state assembly the next time she calls a meeting. And that she will do by splitting the 23-member Congress group. Last week, at least 12 Congress MLAs were all set to bite Mayawati's bait when Congress chief Sonia Gandhi got wind of their impending desertion. She was able to prevent it, but the lure of ministerial office and BSP tickets in the next election is likely to prove stronger than blandishments of 'a better Congress future in UP soon' -- especially after the drubbing the party took in Gujarat. With a dozen BJP legislators itching to pull her down, Mayawati will not convene the winter session of the UP assembly without having enough MLAs in her kitty. Which she can only do by poaching on the Congress flock. Here, she has company. A couple of years ago, then chief minister Kalyan Singh, then of the BJP, had lured Congress legislators to continue in government. Seems Mayawati takes inspiration from her old opponent. Modi the depressor The Gujarat election left not just the Congress depressed. There were long faces in the BJP too. Narendra Modi's success momentarily rendered the Prime Minister's Office speechless, where the gent in charge of the media had convinced himself the BJP wouldn't do all that well. Indeed, you can see his hand in the reports that Modi left Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's election meeting in Gujarat while he was still at the mike. Fact is, due to the security regulation that requires the airspace sealed off for the prime ministerial aircraft 30 minutes before and after its take off, Modi could not have reached the next venue without leaving it at the time he did. The real long faces in the BJP were in the party's second-rung leadership. Given the fact Modi has emerged as the unquestioned BJP boss in Gujarat, Pramod Mahajan and Sushma Swaraj had reason to worry, since they had failed to manage similar victories in Maharashtra and Delhi. Admittedly, Mahajan wields clout in Maharashtra and Goa, but Swaraj doesn't have a permanent electoral base despite her natural ease with words. Following Gujarat, the pecking order in the BJP might put Modi up in the front, after Vajpayee, his deputy L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. Najma's angry Rajya Sabha Deputy Chairperson Najma Heptullah is very angry with Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. Deshmukh is taking his own time over her request to allot a piece of land in south Mumbai to a trust she set up in her late granduncle Maulana Azad's name. Heptullah feels he is sitting on it because he doesn't like her, especially when previous Congress governments have given land to trusts named after lesser-known Congress leaders than Azad. May we respectfully suggest to Heptullah that Deshmukh might not be the fly in her ointment but a couple of senior Congress leaders in Delhi who are none too fond of her 'too-ambitious' nature? And that instead of wasting her breath on Deshmukh she stands a better chance of getting what she wants if she tries to mend fences in the capital? Illustrations: Uttam Ghosh Mail us your comments Capital Buzz
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