Sept 20, 1999

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FELLOW TRAVELLERS
Congressman Dennis and Comrade Surjeet

A political lifetime of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds finally caught up with H.S. Surjeet when he addressed a rally seeking votes for a Congress candidate. N. Dennis, the Congressman who's been Nagercoil's mp since 1980, is part of the AIADMK-Congress-Left alliance in Tamil Nadu. A by-election to the Thiruvattur assembly seat -- part of Nagercoil -- features J. Hemachandran of the CPI(M) as the combine's candidate. Comrades and Congressmen have campaigned hand in hand. Barely 45 km away in Thiruvananthapuram the two are at each other's throats. There, in another of those titanic Kerala contests, the CPI's K. Ramachandran takes on the Congress' V.S. Sivakumar. Surjeet's colleagues explain it all as "dialectical variation". Nagercoil's voters, particularly the many Malayalees, have a more direct term for it: schizophrenia.

-Amrith Lal and K.M. Thomas

THAT'S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
Getting by with a little help from his friends is Madhavrao Scindia. In 1996, when he launched his own party and sought re-election from Gwalior, the BJP -- of which his mother and two sisters are members -- made it easy for him by not putting up a candidate. It extended no such courtesy to other Congress rebels like Arjun Singh. Scindia, a former Jan Sangh man, fondly looks upon some local BJP MLAs as "my men". The affinity is contagious. This year Scindia, now candidate from Guna, first worked on the bsp and ensured it did not oppose him. Next came the SP, whose Prakash Dhakad was a contender for the Yadav votes. So Scindia contacted old pal Amar Singh -- once a Scindia-backed AICC member from Madhya Pradesh, now an SP bigwig. Lo and behold, Dhakad was denied the party's symbol.

-N.K. Singh

Tainted Saffron, Gandhinagar: In Gujarat, the BJP's been on the winning side in Lok Sabha contests since 1989. This year it appears worried. An indicator is the poll-eve induction of Ram Gadhvi of Jamnagar, who faces charges of smuggling, gun running and other crimes, and Jetha Bharwad, a suspended police constable turned SP MLA. In the past, both have been the target of vicious BJP attacks for their "criminality". BJP old timers are hopping mad.

-Uday Mahurkar

Hello Hello, Mumbai: MTNL clients in the Dadar-Prabhadevi area of Mumbai North Central were taken aback when the Shiv Sena turned to tele-marketing. "I am Manohar Joshi," the recorded message on the other side said, in English, Hindi and Marathi, "I am your candidate. Please vote for me ... Jai Maharashtra." Calculative Congressmen at once got down to figuring out how many phones there were in the constituency and how much each call cost -- and if Joshi had overshot his EC-decreed budget.

-V. Shankar Aiyar

LIFE BEYOND SONIA
Vijayashanti is the BJP mascot in Andhra
Her aggressive roles make her the "(s)he man" of Telugu filmdom. This year, however, Vijayashanti missed the star billing of a lifetime when Sonia Gandhi decided not to stand from Cuddapah. The would-have-been BJP candidate against the Congress chief is nevertheless campaigning hard. To cries of "Ramulamma" -- her name in the eponymous blockbuster Osey Ramulamma -- Vijayashanti tells her people, "If we recover all the money looted by Congressmen, there will be enough to remove poverty in not only Andhra Pradesh but the entire country." The hysteria she evokes already has some BJP chaps dreaming about the next election.

-Amarnath K. Menon

THREE OF A KIND
If C.K. Jaffer Sharief wins the Bangalore North seat for the eighth time, he will also achieve a unique treble. His chief rival this year is JD(U)-BJP nominee and trade union leader Michael Fernandes (top left). Michael is also the brother of Defence Minister George Fernandes, who lost to Sharief from the same constituency in 1984. A third brother, Lawrence (top right), is a former city mayor. He took on Sharief in 1989 -- unsuccessfully.

If Sharief, a veteran Congressman and railway minister in the P.V. Narasimha Rao years, retains his Muslim and Dalit dominated pocket borough, he would have defeated all three Fernandes brothers at some stage or the other. The family has an ancestral home in the city's Richmond Town area. There's a fourth brother too -- Paul. He can't be a contender for Sharief though because he lives in Canada. Oh yes, he's a politician there.

-Stephen David

ZED MAN TALKING
The Congress has a brilliant new idea
Forget the opinion polls, Congressmen are not giving up. There's this terrific theory that forecasts yet another hung Lok Sabha. Vijay Kalantri, treasurer of the Congress' Maharashtra unit, calls it the "Z factor". It goes thus: draw a Z-shaped line that extends from Punjab, moves through Uttar Pradesh, dips into Maharashtra, cuts across northern and eastern Karnataka and splits Andhra to exit into the Bay of Bengal. Say the Congress' in-house psephologists, "The graph denotes the area where the BJP stands to lose close to 40 seats." In other words this theory -- evolved in synergy with a corporate house -- holds the Congress will emerge as the largest party.

-V. Shankar Aiyar

Bhardwaj Runs A Divine Campaign
Nitish Bhardwaj -- Krishna in the TV serial Mahabharat, once a BJP MP from Jamshedpur and now taking on Digvijay Singh's brother Laxman in Rajgarh -- spent the better part of Janmashthmi dressed up as the blue god, right down to the flute and Sudarshan Chakra. Accompanied by little kids dressed as cowherds, he went around breaking earthern-pots filled with butter and got himself weighed against curd, milk and honey. Bhardwaj's wordplay was appropriate, "If you vote for the wrong person, even Kansa and Shakuni can become rulers." Mein Gott.

-N.K. Singh

CRYSTAL BALL
Vajpayee will be the winner. He will become a leader of global stature.
In two years Vajpayee may step down, name next PM.
Sonia'll bounce back post-2001.

Ma Prem Usha, tarot card reader
Delhi-based Ma Prem Usha is the leading exponent of the tarot system of fortune telling in India. She is currently working on a project aimed at Indianising the art of the tarot cards by introducing local patterns.

YES AND NO
Subrata joins Mamata
When he starred in a Bengali tv serial, they called Subrata Mukherjee the West Bengal Congress' leading man. Now he's found a leading lady in one-time foe Mamata Banerjee and joined the Trinamool Congress. There's this technicality: he remains a Congress MLA and says the anti-defection law will apply "only if I disobey the party whip". So he's waiting to be expelled.

-Avirook Sen

RELY ON HIM
Dhirubhai writes a letter
Dhirubhai Ambani recently wrote a letter to South Mumbai voters suggesting that, "For the business and financial nerve centre of India I am unable to think of a better representative than Murli Deora." The glowing recommendation praises Deora for "getting along with people across the political spectrum". There is even nostalgia about the time the two spent in the yarn trade. Of course, the letter makes no mention of the Congress, Deora's party.

-Priya Ramani

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