On poll-eve it is "Advantage Atal"

Inder Malhotra IT is surely arguable that the public opinion poll predicting a comfortable majority for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is a tad too early.

Firm forecasts are best avoided at this stage.

What a few thousand individuals chosen at random might say in January does not necessarily reflect what the people might do in the privacy of the polling booth in April-May.

Even so, it is fair to add that even the naked eye can discern the edge that the BJP-led NDA enjoys over the Secular Alliance that the Congress president, Ms.

Sonia Gandhi, is trying to put together, valiantly but belatedly.

It must hasten to clarify, however, that it is neither the NDA, with its shifting and rather nebulous composition, nor the BJP, with its mixed and often mixed-up performance, that has endeared itself to the electorate.

It is the Prime Minister, Mr.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, and he alone who has made both the ruling combination and its core, the saffron party, acceptable to the country.

"Advantage Atal" is the principal reality of the political scene today.

The reasons for Mr.

Vajpayee's pre-eminence and pervasive popularity are too obvious to need recounting in detail.

He has shown himself to be a statesman, not a mere politician.

He has kept a 24-party coalition going for more five years which is remarkable in this country's fractious politics since the collapse of the last one-party government, technically in 1996 but actually seven years earlier in 1989 with Rajiv Gandhi's defeat.

Even more important is Atalji's success in keeping the BJP on a course of moderation that has made him a winner even though, in the process, he has often compromised and dissembled, making different speeches to different audiences and trying to be all things to all people.

His skilful steering of foreign policy, climaxed by the joint statement he issued along with Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, that has strengthened the peace process, has added lustre to his record.

Contrary to the general impression, Pakistan has had little to do with elections in the country over the last five decades, except during the disgraceful Gujarat assembly elections in December 2002, in the wake of the unspeakable bloodbath in that state.

All subsequent assembly polls have shown that making peace with Pakistan enjoys much greater support than does Pakistan-bashing.

No one should belittle Ms.

Sonia Gandhi's efforts to mount a challenge to the coalition led by Mr.

She has striven hard to win friends and allies for her single-point agenda of ousting the BJP from power.

At considerable cost to herself, she has conceded that there is no pre-determined leader of the Secular Front which, if victorious in the battle of the ballot, would choose the future Prime Minister after the polls.

Shedding her regal aloofness at 10 Janpath, she has gone to the homes of her potential allies, including some who, in earlier times, might not have been granted an audience had they requested it.

But her exertions look like producing only limited results, except in Tamil Nadu where her party's partnership with the DMK, the MDMK and the two Left parties does amount to a formidable combination.

In the key state of U.P.

the Congress, bereft any state leaders of consequences, languishes in the fourth position.

It trails behind the Samajwadi Party (SP) of Mr.

Mulayam Singh Yadav, now the State's chief minister for the third time; the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) led by the mercurial Ms.

Mayawati; and the BJP.

Yadav seemed to be the natural ally of the Congress for he was even louder in denouncing the "communal BJP" for "destroying secularism".

Now, however, his priorities are different.

He is determined to fight on his own, with such local allies as he can muster, and decide on which side to join in New Delhi only after the elections are over.

In doing so, he has underscored the fundamental fact of Indian political life - that pre-poll alliances are of little significance and the post-poll alliances, with an eye on sharing power and spoils of office, alone matter.

As if to reaffirm this, Mr.

Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Ms.

Jayalalithaa of the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu have announced that they would support the NDA "from outside" but decide on joining the NDA government only afterwards.

These are voices of experience.

Over the last five years, Mr.

Naidu, with 30 Lok Sabha members of his party at his beck and call, had discovered that it was more "rewarding" to support the Vajpayee government from outside than to have two or more cabinet berths in New Delhi.

To revert to Ms.

Sonia Gandhi's problems, the only possible ally in U.

Mayawati and, as both the BJP and SP have discovered to their dismay, any alliance with her cannot but be a double-edged sword.

Moreover, the Congress president has been delivered a big blow also by her supposed allies, the Left parties, that continue to talk of two anti-BJP fronts, not one.

The Congress' alliance with the National Congress Party (NCP) is not just ironic because the NCP was formed solely on the issue of Ms.

Gandhi's "foreign origin" and has now split into two on this question.

It also creates fresh problems.

Confined almost exclusively to Maharashtra and Mr.

Sharad Pawar, this alliance inhibits the Congress from mobilising its support base in the Vidharba region where the demand for a separate state has been gathering momentum.

Gandhi's inability to go beyond a promise to appoint a new states' reorganisation commission could erode her party's strength without doing any harm to Mr.

Pawar whose political interests extend only to Western Maharashtra.

Maharahtra Congress leaders are under pressure to hold assembly elections along with those to the Lok Sabha rather than a few months later when they would have to be held anyhow, especially now that the Congress-ruled Karnataka and the BJD-BJP governed Orissa have opted for simultaneous polls.

The reluctance of the Maharashtra chief minister, Mr.

Sushil Kumar Shinde, and his colleagues to accept the idea is generally interpreted as Congress' nervousness.

On top of this has come Ms.

Gandhi's confused and confusing response to the party's clamour for drafting her children daughter Priyanka and son Rahul into active politics and electioneering.

Pramod Mahajan's tasteless and needless remarks apart, the fact remains that the whole episode has done the Congress no credit.

Under the circumstances, is it any surprise that so shrewd an observer of the political scene as Mr.

Arun Nehru has prognosticated, over two weeks running, that the NDA would pip the Sonia-led alliance to the winning post by great many lengths? He does have his strong likes and dislikes, of course.

Gandhi is perhaps the leader he dislikes the most.

But his conclusions are not based on prejudice or sentiment but on cold political calculations.

His estimate of 244 for the NDA, 125 for the Congress and its allies, 60 for the Left Front and 116 for others, (with Samajwadi Party, the Telugu Desam and the AIADMK winning 85 seats) may have a margin of error of 5 to 8 per cent.

But it basically reflects the configuration of political forces as of today.

In other words, instead of winning an outright majority in the House the NDA would have to cobble it by persuading the TDP, the AIADMK and even the SP, to join it.

Nehru's most depressing conclusion is that the BJP with 178 seats and the Congress with 99 (to be reduced to a double-digit figure would be a humiliation for the party) together would have fewer members in the next Lok Sabha than they had in the outgoing one.

The meaning of this state of affairs is both clear and stark.