THE UP FAL OUT

Although Samajwadi Party General Secretary Amar Singh’s “friendship” with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh goes back over a decade and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav had been playing peacemaker between the Congress and the SP for months, it was only on June 24 that Congress President Sonia Gandhi finally decided to forget the past.

On that day, say highly placed Congress sources, she called Digvijay Singh, AICC General Secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh, and state unit president Rita Bahuguna Joshi to her residence, asking them what they felt about the Congress tying up with the SP. She told them that this was necessary in the face of the Left’s intransigence on the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) had already withdrawn support from the UPA Government.

A week earlier, on June 18, when the PM decided to postpone the ninth meeting of the UPA-Left mechanism on the deal, scheduled for June 25, he had called up the Congress President to explain why the Government was compelled to defy the Left and go to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to confirm the India-specific safeguards agreement.

Events unfolded quickly thereafter. Amar Singh called on External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the National Security Advisor briefed SP leaders, the SP approached former President APJ Abdul Kalam to seek his already-known views on the deal and finally, tea and snacks at 10 Janpath, four years after Amar Singh had left in a huff swearing revenge for being “humiliated” by host Sonia at a dinner ahead of the formation of the UPA Government.

The reunion
On July 4, Amar Singh walked with SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav into the sequestered residence of Sonia at 10 Janpath and offered apologies for whatever had happened in the past—Amar Singh’s personal attack on Sonia being the most vitriolic....