Explaining the context in which Rahul had taken the initiative to call up Amar Singh, Congress sources said the party had realised the “sheer impossibility” of any long-term relations with the BSP. “Mayawati had prime ministerial ambitions and to achieve that she was looking to dig into our vote bank, especially the Dalits, across the country. The SP, on the other hand, had its ambitions limited to UP. While the Congress and the SP could share the secular votes in UP, our party could gain from this alliance outside the state,” said a senior Congress leader involved in UP affairs.

But four years ago things couldn’t have been more different.

In May 2004, CPI(M) general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet took an uninvited Amar Singh to a UPA dinner hosted by Sonia. Cold shouldered at the event, the Samajwadi Party became a dueller in a spectacular political feud.

The chill between the parties became tangibly frosty when the Centre loudly mulled the imposition of President’s rule in SP-ruled Uttar Pradesh just before the assembly polls last year. On February 14, the Supreme Court had disqualified with retrospective effect 13 BSP MLAs who had defected to help Mulayam form the government in 2003. In the melee that followed, the SP angrily withdrew its outside support to the UPA.

The SP then cosied up to the Left over the nuclear deal and more generally against the US; most memorably, at a joint public rally with the Left parties on November 13, 2005 in Lucknow, the SP criticised the Government for allegedly jettisoning India’s non-aligned stand on Iran under US pressure.

... contd.