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Mayawati dropped into the Capital for a day last week. It was a no-frills visit. This time, she didn’t bother with the fanfare of a high-voltage press conference in a five-star hotel to demand Rs80,000 crore for UP or try to grab headlines with snide remarks about Rahul Gandhi’s bathing habits. She kept out of the limelight to concentrate on work at hand. In the 24 hours that she was here, she finalised her first list of candidates for the December assembly elections in Delhi, giving us a glimpse of the single-minded manner in which she is going about trying to achieve her ultimate goal of making a bid for the PM’s post next year.

The Delhi state elections are seven months away but she has already chosen nominees for 25 of the 70 assembly seats. She has also finalised her candidates for two of the seven Lok Sabha seats. She hopes to complete both lists by the end of the month. While the Congress and the BJP are still sorting out internal squabbles and mulling over names, the BSP is ready to hit the campaign trail. Mayawati’s advance planning will give her Delhi nominees a six-month advantage over the candidates of the two national parties in the state polls and a lead time of one year for the parliamentary elections. Who says elephants are slow movers? This one doesn’t lumber; it gallops.

Mayawati’s first-off-the-block tactics are not a guarantee of success. She’s a Johnny-com-lately in the world of politics while the Congress is the grand old party of India. But her aggressive style, no-nonsense approach and economy of decision-making are serving to drive the Congress into a blue funk. Its leaders have already blamed the loss of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh on the BSP. And they’ve prepared themselves for the worst by spreading the word that she’s going to cut into their votes in faraway Karnataka as well. Interestingly, Mayawati did meticulous advance planning in this south Indian state. She chose most of her nominees six months ago and some were handpicked as far back as 2004, immediately after the assembly elections.

The Congress, on the other hand, was fighting off claimants till the very end. Consequently, its candidates are scrambling to put together an effective campaign to stop the BSP from eating into traditional Congress votes and upsetting the electoral arithmetic. In Karnataka, Mayawati is still a distant figure and may not really reconfigure the picture as much as the Congress fears. But in the four Hindi-speaking states that go to polls in December, her shadow looms large on the horizon. She is already screening names for the upcoming elections in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. This is the critical belt that will decide who gets the right to lead the next government — the Congress, the BJP, or by some stroke of amazing luck, Mayawati.

The Congress has the advantage of riding an anti-incumbency wave against the BJP in this region, provided it overcomes its paranoia of an elephant in destruction mode.

TAILPIECE

There’s no better way to make friends in Pakistan than to gift them a slice of Bollywood. When he goes to Islamabad later this month, Pranab Mukherjee will be carrying gift packs of a new series created by the ministry of external affairs and SaReGaMa of four decades of Hindi film songs. The four-CD set covers melodies from the fifties to the eighties and is a truly collector’s item. Just the right note to strike with the new dispensation in Pakistan!

Email:a_jerath@dnaindia.net