10 April 2004	Saturday	19 Safar 1425

NEW DELHI, April 9: India's ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), unleashed a volley of calibrated attacks on opposition leader Sonia Gandhi on Friday , after a widely followed opinion poll showed Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's party falling short of a majority in the April-May general elections.

A survey by the respected magazine The Week said Mr Vajpayee's Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its NDA allies are likely to fall short of a majority, securing between 230 and 265 seats in the Lok Sabha election.

Ms Gandhi's Congress party and its partners may bag 170 to 200 seats, says the survey. The winner must get the support of at least 272 deputies. Other parties, comprising regional groups like the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party in Uttar Pradesh and Communist Party of India-Marxist, will get 95 to 110 seats, the survey said.

It was conducted by market research agency TNS, among 17,513 voters across 143 constituency between March 25 and April 1. This is the first survey that says the NDA would fail to reach the simple majority mark. Earlier opinion polls had suggested a clear majority for Mr Vajpayee. But at least one research agency, which predicted an NDA victory, later claimed a major television group wrongly quoted it.

An indication that all was not well in the NDA camp was reflected in the election promises the alliance offered on Thursday. Apparently untrusting of its own campaign of projecting economic progress in the so-called India Shining ad blitzkrieg, the alliance took an insurance policy by including the religious campaign for a Hindu temple in Ayodhya as a key plank.

But the most focused attack was reserved for Ms Gandhi on Friday when a clutch of NDA politicians released a book on Sonia Gandhi, in which issues ranged from her foreign origins to her alleged involvement in the unending Bofors guns saga. Mr M.J. Akbar, editor of The Asian Age newspaper, who presided at the book launch, gave their campaign credence.

The book launch coincided with the serialized publication of an interview in The Asian Age, of the main police investigator in Stockholm who probed the 1986 scam. Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was named in the scandal but was recently cleared by a court in Delhi.