Why should Mulayam Singh Yadav support a Congress-led minority government when the party has left no one in any doubt that its prime target in Uttar Pra-desh is the Samajwadi Party? Congress may fear the BJP but it hates Mulayam Singh Yadav.

The Samajwadi Party leader can mobilise the minorities if he is seen to be in direct combat with the BJP, at the centre as well as in the state. But what plank does he stand on if Congress chief Sonia Gandhi is in occupation of the Prime Ministerial gaddi in New Delhi and he is seen to be supporting her from the outside? He will simply dissolve against this backdrop. He needs the BJP to stand out in bold relief.

And this stand of the Samajwadi Partywas clear as daylight to anyone who spoke to Mulayam Singh's trusted adviser, Amar Singh, on the very day that the Vajpayee government fell.

If there was any ambivalence in Mul-ayam Singh's stance vis-a-vis the Congress in the past week, it was because he expected the Congress managers to come down from their ``high horse'' and discuss Uttar Pradesh with him. And, mark my words, if he ever comes around to being on talking terms with the Congress, a conversation on UP between him and the Congress will have preceded his conversion.

Since the Congress managers did not engage Mulayam Singh Yadav in a dialogue, directly or indirectly, Sonia Gandhi was trapped. All that posturing, that elegant indifference to messy coalitions, indeed to power, have all been dissipated in her very first emergence from cloistered politics. The Congress party managers, the authors of Sonia Gandhi as a project, will from now onwards have to live with the guilt of having wasted their trump card. They will have egg on their face ifthe BJP bounces back, much more securely in the 12th or the 13th Lok Sabha (i.e., after the elections). All that the BJP has to do is not to be noisy. Let Atal Behari Vajpayee come across as one who has been sinned against.

How a 115-year-old party allowed itself to be so used by All India Anna Dravaida Mun-netra Kazhagam (AIA-DMK) chief Jayalali-tha's brilliant chess mo- ves, will remain an astonishing feature of the current mess. In fact, Sonia Gandhi walked into Subramanian Swa-my's trap the moment she turned up for tea.

When Bahujan Sa-maj Party leader Maya-wati switched her vote against the BJP, it was clear the lady was holding out a carrot for the Congress to chew in UP. Mayawati brackets the BJP and the Congress as two variants of ``Manuwadi'' snakes, and yet there were those in the party who were inclined to consider her blandishments. Mulayam Singh Yadav would have had to be a political moron to back a Congress party in that mood.

If Sonia Gandhi was to be fielded as prime minister or kingmaker, surely some elementary homework should have been done by those so-called `experienced leaders' who claim proximity to her. First, they shielded her from public view. She would not be tainted by coalition politics. She was busy building the party. Organisation elections were due in August. Then Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka would go to polls in November where the Congress was expected to do well. A party on the ascendant could then contemplate general elections.

It was a plausible ga-me plan. Why then did you push her into that tea party at Subraman-ian Swamy's residence, which precipitated political developments ov-er which the Congress lost control? The shy and retiring Congress leader was hurriedly set up for a swayamvar which swiftly degenerated into a frenetic disco dance.

How on earth could the party have imagined that Mulayam Singh Yadav would support a Congress government without the party showing sensitivity to the Samajwadi Party leader's stakes in UP?

And now that the Congress is willingto go in for a coalition as well, do you know what this means? It means the party is willing for a messier coalition now than was possible on March 14, 1998. The only advantage it can cite for having refrained from power a year ago was that thwarting the BJP once again (after the party's 13 days in power) would have conferred martyrdom on Atal Be-hari Vajpayee. Fair enough. But why are you dismounting from your high horse now? Remember, Mulayam Singh Ya-dav and Laloo Prasad Yadav were imploring you to form a government in September? With an imperious wave of the hand you spurned them then. Why this scramble for power now?

The front page photograph last week etched on my mind shows Jyoti Basu and Sonia Gandhi seated on a sofa. The contrast was stunning. Here was a leader wizened with experience, dignified, educa-ted, one who had navigated his party in power for two decades and yet deferential to the views of his party. He cannot accept prime ministership unless his party endorses the move.

Seated oppositehim is a novice, a prime ministerial candidate, imperiously averse to any debate in the party. I wonder what has happened to folks like Rajesh Pilot, who once spoke fearlessly against P.V. Narasimha Rao, Sitaram Kesri and anyone else? Has his democratic impulse been muffled? Had Congress leaders not been reduced to fawning, nonentities, more sensible opinion and advice would have been available to Sonia Gandhi. Had she had that advice, she would not have been placed in circumstance where the poet's line seems apt.

``Naukri millna payee thi, ke pension ho gai'' (I was pensioned off before I could get the job).

The entire political mess at the moment can be traced to the Congress party's total unwillingness to gauge political realities. Vajpayee in his farewell speech in Parliament accepted conditions as inevitable. Unless this basic reality sinks in, the Congress party will continue to blunder imperiously.