Now, suddenly, the ruling party establishment appears to have lost all its awesome leverage. And things are drifting from the course it had charted out for the first seven months of the UPA2. The immediate fallout of this power shift has been an image problem for the party chief. We don't know as yet whether this is a transient setback. Perhaps she may reestablish her balancing role soon. That is some thing we have to watch. But the bungling on the women's reservation bill certainly epitomised the prevailing chaotic situation. No amount of shifting game can probably explain the damage this has done to Sonia Gandhi's personal image and stature.

After projecting the women's bill as her prestige project and pushing it through the Rajya Sabha following the first day's flop, dropping it all of a sudden has been an inexplicable letdown of the leader. The official justification that it was only to facilitate the budget passage and approval of the US-mandated nuclear liability bill has only further damaged her stature. It is a bad policy to claim that the party chief's standing and eminence could be bartered for some highly controversial government business. Here is a truth that every one within the Congress party knows but would not like to admit in public. During the past six weeks, Sonia Gandhi's image as a champion of the poor and excluded classes has suffered a severe drubbing at the hands of those pushing a different kind of economic and foreign policy philosophy.

Neither bold assertions nor silence can conceal this truth. All her flagship programmes like NREGS, food security, Right to Information Act, right to education and rural health scheme are being either slowed down or badly diluted. In 2009 elections, these were the showpieces that had enhanced her image as the aam aadmi's ultimate hope. And that campaign had brought rich electoral dividends to the Congress. Next time, she will be hard put to explain why she kept silent when her ministers have reduced the allocation for social security and welfare by 13 per cent and substantially cut down the food subsidy. This year's budget has not given any provision for her much hoped right to food bill. Instead, there is a cut of Rs. 424 crore in food subsidy. In 2007-08, she was able to force a 67 per cent rise in social sector allocation. This year, the total allocation is just Rs. 1,000 crore.

A clear dip in this year's allocations for agriculture, food supply to the poor, rural development, health, employment, social security, education and energy is seen as a direct challenge to Sonia Gandhi's development vision and strategy to retain her carefully cultivated support base. Each of her flagship schemes is being twisted and diluted by innumerable official panels using devious means like reducing BPL coverage, transferring the 'burden' on states, introducing cash payment (in 50s and 60s experts had found that cash payments straight went to bootleggers and village gamblers, not to buy grains) and decontrols (of fertilizers). All this was to reduce the Centre's subsidy 'burden' which in other words will mean taking the edge off Soniaji's popular initiatives.

Look at the party establishment's lost fight on prices. Sonia Gandhi herself had asked the government to take firm steps. The Congress Working Committee had frowned on the government's failure at least twice. Yet the Finance Minister made an across-the-board hike in excise duty, more so on petroleum products. Still the government side has no convincing plans to check the price rise. Clearly, it is a clash of two different visions. The reform camp seems to have successfully subverted the Congress agenda and robbed Sonia Gandhi of her carefully cultivated pro-aam aadmi aura. Still worse, the government is dragging the Congress into a palpable elitist trap. While shredding Soniaji's welfare schemes, the whole focus has shifted to the high salaried upper middle classes and corporates who this time got a tax benefit of over Rs. 26,000 crore and a stimulus bonanza of over Rs. 80,000 crore.

Rightly or wrongly, each of the government's recent initiative is adding to its rich and powerful image. A more worrisome trend has been that non-political players like jurists, intellectuals, NGOs and religious men are now taking over protests against the UPA's unusual zeal for favouring the US firms at the cost of what they feel the future generation's health. An impression is gaining that the whole Bt. brinjal and cotton controversy is to safeguard the business interests of US firms Cargill and Monsanto. Similarly, the UPA is staking everything to save two other US firms - GE and Westinghouse - from paying compensation in the event of a nuclear catastrophe to millions of innocent Indians.

When Baba Ramdev from his 'Bharat Swabhiman' platform says such things, it reaches out to millions outside the political domain. The wayside pandits and pujaris are now picking the cue and include the swabhiman and 'cultural degeneration' in their religious discourses. Themes like 'Hindustani's life is 23 times cheaper than American's' is so widely known at temple premises. What we fail to realize is that such information penetration is more effective than a hundred editorials and studio debates in mainstream media. In India, public opinion has a curious way of evolving itself. It has often been so perplexing that even in the morning of the results, every one, both in Congress and BJP, had reconciled to a 'feel-good' sweep for the NDA in May, 2004.

Prior to the polls, when Jairam Ramesh at the Congress campaign office had coined the term aam aadmi, most of us had lampooned it as worthless jargon. Salaried middle classes, the main beneficiaries of liberalization, were still with the BJP. Corporates were overwhelmingly happy. The mainstream media had gone the whole hog about the 'national resurgence' and an 'unstoppable India' under Vajpayee. From abroad, the NRIs sang more paeans. The success of the NRIs and Indian takeovers of business abroad were regular media staple. NDA's quadrilateral highway scheme was projected as solving the whole transport problem. All the while no one could sense the intensity of the parallel public opinion. The situation now seems to be strikingly similar. and this should cause considerable worry to the Congress establishment. (IPA Service)