Left and Right for the Centre

Don't know about you, but it seems to me that the Congress doesn't much fancy its own chances this election.

Either that, or the party is looking to dent the Opposition's morale by dropping hints of getting the BJP-led NDA's allies on board. So Rahul Gandhi says "there is a possibility" of getting the JD(U) on board, though Nitish Kumar has thwarted any such overtures with a curt "No thanks." A third possibility is that the Congress can see a near-rout or a close call happening, so being assured of more people joining the party (I mean that figuratively) will make it easier to calculate post-poll equations.

Political analysts say that low voter turnouts in three phases of voting conducted in the country thus far may actually go against the Congress' wishes. Either that, or the Congress will romp home with a majority vote (which would not be such a bad thing; when was the last time we had a majority government?). In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena-BJP combine is already telling itself that they're getting more seats than their Opposition, and people in the know tend to agree. Yet, this is Indian politics and though it is a game of numbers, it is not pure math.

Rahul is doing well to announce that his party is keeping its options open. That is actually a way to keep your detractors both wondering and working harder still. It also lets fringe players know they have a space to go to after the polls. What I want to know is how the Congress hopes to quickly sew together new alliances in such a small space of time when its old ones crumbled and crashed without the party having even the slightest hint of the state of affairs to come. For all its Grand Old Party yadda yadda, you'd think the Congress was smarter than that.