The fires still burn. The immediate provocation was the November 19 inauguration of the controversy-ridden first building of IGNCA, India's premier culture promoter (see box). Sonia, Maneka's camp says, refused to attend the function if Maneka, as minister for culture, were seated on the dais. The Congress predictably denied this. Numerous other theories began doing the rounds as well.

BJP spokesman V.K. Malhotra bizarrely claimed Jagmohan, tourism minister, had anyway been promised the Culture Ministry three months ago. The RSS, some observers divined, was behind Maneka's transfer because she approved of an M.F. Husain exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) and removed P.V. Krishna Bhatta, an ABVP man, as chairman of IGNCA's Bangalore regional centre.

Certainly the most unique theory blamed everything on the dogs. Some time ago Maneka, in her capacity as an animal rights activist, had dashed off a letter to the South Korean ambassador in Delhi in protest against his country's practice of eating dogs. Maneka, sources in the PMO claimed, had thereby caused a diplomatic incident and needed to be pulled up.

When contacted, Maneka confirmed she had written the letter but added that this was her third communication with the ambassador in recent weeks. The first was a phone call "when we discovered a Korean-owned restaurant in Chennai was serving dog meat. I told him this was illegal". Soon afterwards, residents of Maharani Bagh — the south Delhi neighbourhood where Maneka stays — complained that the food habits of a Korean diplomat were causing stray dogs to disappear. Maneka was again on the phone and the "ambassador didn't deny the allegations".

For Maneka none of this was important. What mattered was that she had been taking on Sonia. On July 23, a month and a half before Maneka became culture minister, the term of the NMML society expired. Maneka was convinced that the NMML's annual allocation of Rs 4.5 crore was being misused: "I wouldn't be surprised if money from here was being used to fund other Rajiv Gandhi Foundation projects."

Such financial suspicions were complemented by intellectual misgivings. The personal papers of Jawaharlal Nehru are stored at the NMML. Maneka says Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie told her the removal of the Congress-Sonia hegemony from the NMML society would make these papers more accessible to scholars. So Maneka drew up a list of 50 names for the prime minister to choose from. It specifically excluded Congress politicians. Even so, only a few from it got the PMO's nod.

The other side was not inactive. Congress sources admit K. Natwar Singh-the NMF's representative on the NMML governing society-and Manmohan met the prime minister with a Sonia wish list that included senior partymen such as Rafiq Zakaria.

Natwar denies this: "No such list exists. No message was conveyed." So was 10 Janpath alarmed at Maneka's "proactive" steps at the Culture Ministry? Suman Dubey, journalist and family confidant, says, "I never got the feeling that anybody was worried. There were fears Maneka may do damage to the institutions, not about anything personal."

While it is tempting to see the politics of culture as a "tu tu main main" between Indira Gandhi's two bahus, this is, to be fair, not quite accurate.

For one, it is Maneka who is doing most of the talking, leaking and alleging; Sonia is silent. You can attribute this to dignity or the fact that, as inheritor of the dynasty's edifice, she can speak through various proxies, an indulgence denied to Maneka. Even so, some allegations simply cannot be independently verified. For instance, Maneka says the recent Katherine Frank biography of Indira Gandhi-which Maneka successfully took to court after it claimed Sanjay and she murdered people-was masterminded by Sonia "just to forward her own image". Let anyone try and prove that.