``It's a farce that Bhujbal should today lead an alliance that will have Dalits and Muslims because there is no person with lesser credibility than him for the job,'' said Congress general secretary Kripa Shankar Singh today. ``Bhujbal has no right to talk about Dalits and Muslims at all,'' Singh added. The Congress is likely to work this into the election campaign too.

The party's logic enunciated by Singh is that Bhujbal committed three cardinal and unforgivable mistakes: when he was the Mumbai mayor, he had the Hutatma Chowk washed and cleaned to purify it after the Dalits' morcha, as a Shiv Sena MLA he made anobscene gesture indicating Muslims in the state assembly to emphasise that they should live in Pakistan and faced two days' punishment for it, and lastly, he declared in Pune that Mahatma Gandhi's statues should be replaced with those of Nathuram Godse.

``It's very easy to forget but it's a fact that Bhujbal said and did these things not so many years ago; how can the Dalits and Muslims trust him now,'' Singh wondered. Bhujbal, along with a few Sena MLAs, had defected to the Congress in Nagpur a few years ago and subsequently became a trusted confidant of Sharad Pawar.

If the Congress stand is any indication, it seems that the Congress and NCP will go all out in a name-calling battle in the election campaign. Asked why the Congress did not refer to any of these incidents, but in fact supported Bhujbal, all these years that he was in the party, Singh said, ``certain things have to be said at the right time''.