The aborted operation to install Sonia Gandhi as Prime Minister had bypassed Pawar and other CWC leaders, with decisions made by a group of four. Sonia Gandhi is obviously trying to make amends and has been calling senior leaders for consultations in the last few days to elicit their opinions on alliances the party should forge and the strategies to follow. She called Pawar for a one to one interaction on two successive days.

Pawar had not been happy at the wayhe was divested of the responsibility of handling the Rashtriya Loktantrik Morcha. He had handled the parties of Laloo Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav for the confidence vote, but was suddenly handed over a list of sundry groups of one and two MPs to bring around for government formation. Arjun Singh was assigned the task of dealing with the RLM, and Samajwadi Party leaders say that he communicated with Mulayam not directly but through a pilot from UP.

In all likelihood, the coming elections are going to throw up a fractured verdict, and besides Pawar, Jairam Ramesh, who is considered close to 10, Janpath, also made the same point at the CII meet. But Pawar's statement has sent shockwaves in the Congress. Party leaders said that for the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha to publicly admit that the Congress would not win the forthcoming polls was to acknowledge defeat even before the battle had begun.

Sharad Pawar put his finger on the reasons for the Congress' decline when he said that theleaderships of the mainstream parties needed to recognise and respect the ambitions of newly emerging groups, which want their due in the power structure. Unless this happened, the results of the coming polls would not be very different from those of the last three elections which had thrown up hung parliaments.

Politically decoded, it was reaching out to the likes of Mulayam and Laloo, the BSP and Jayalalitha and others, and signalling to them that unlike Sonia, he was not averse to power sharing and coalition arrangements.

If the present trends continue, Pawar may emerge as a leader in the Congress with the largest group of MPs. Besides the Maharashtra lot, he has been known to fund many others in different states in the various elections.

It is also acknowledged by many privately that had a Congress leader other than Sonia emerged, he or she might have clicked this time to head an alternative government. It was difficult for Mulayam to stomach both a Congress minority government and that too led by aperson associated with UP. Though with Sonia firmly in the Congress saddle, a Congress government led by anyone other than her seems inconceivable as of now, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction particularly in coalition politics. At any rate, Pawar is making it clear that he wants his due to be given him in Maharashtra.

It seems the Congress is now veering around to a decision to repeat its sitting MPs, given the groundswell of anger among them at having to go back to the people in 13 months. The Congress has 33 MPs from Maharashtra and four allies. It will have to decide 11 more seats and though the party high command had made Pratap Rao Bhosale as PCC chief with a view to counter Pawar, the Maratha's message is clear: do not sideline me. In recent local elections in the Vidarbha region, party candidates had lost because Pawar's nominees had not been given tickets.

Pawar's reference to the way Jawaharlal Nehru created a team of stalwarts around him and welcomed criticism from them, and his wordsabout the growing centralisation of decision making, was a veiled criticism of Sonia Gandhi and her managers.

Pawar had not spoken in this vein for the last eight months and this too is an indication that Sonia's position has weakened in the aftermath of the failure to form an alternative arrangement.