15 May 2004	Saturday	24 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

NEW DELHI, May 14: The memories of Gujarat's anti-Muslim pogrom emerged as the essential glue to cobble together a disparate coalition in India on Friday and it appeared set to anoint Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi as the country's next prime minister.

"Issues change, the perspectives change in politics," said Praful Patel, the right hand man of Sharad Pawar, leader of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). "Who would have thought that the Congress would get 12 MPs from Gujarat? That's a political statement we cannot afford to ignore."

Gujarat was the scene of widespread massacre of more than 2000 Muslims in February 2002. The subsequent religious polarization had helped Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party to sweep the state polls later that year.

But this week's results showed an unexpected change when they gave the Congress 12 out of the state's 26 parliamentary seats. BJP leader and outgoing Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani said the national verdict was a fractured one which did not endorse anyone but did not reject his party either.

But Thursday's verdict was summed up differently by Bihar's socialist leader Laloo Prasad Yadav, who said everyone opposed to rightwing Hindu hordes of Gujarat was "ordered by the people" to form a secular coalition.

"Sonia Gandhi will be the prime minister, there should be no confusion in anyone's mind," he told reporters. Mr Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal Party was a close ally of the Congress in Bihar.

Mr Patel's remarks in TV discussion reflected a U-turn in the stance of Ms Gandhi's opponents among the allies. The NCP is essentially a rump group of the Congress that walked out over Ms Gandhi's foreign origins.

With this softening came similarly mild remarks from the Samajwadi Party, another critic of Ms Gandhi and considered close to India's Reliance Industries behemoth. Business was expected to hold the key to the path ahead, chiefly after the stock markets plunged to their recent low on Friday.

The Samajwadi Party rules India's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh where the Congress needs to grow vertically to garner seats to form a government on its own in the future.

But on Friday, Samajwadi spokesman Shahid Siddiqui said in a TV discussion that his party's support to Ms Gandhi would not be decided by its disputes from the past, but rather on what the secular mandate for the task ahead.

Much of the initiative though by and large remained with the communist-led Left Front, which got an unprecedented 64 seats in parliament. Most of the Left Front partners support Ms Gandhi's candidature for the top job.

Yet their biggest component, the Communist Party of India-Marxist, was not sure if it would be part of her government or would support it from outside. The party's central committee will meet on Sunday to take a decision. It had denied a chance to Jyoti Basu to become prime minister in 1996.

Addressing a press conference at his residence in New Delhi, CPI- M general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet said he had a discussion with Mr Pawar and Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav earlier in the day and they agreed to not let the issue of Ms Gandhi's foreign origins become a stumbling block in the formation of the government.

Mr Surjeet said both Mr Pawar and Mr Mulayam had said that Ms Gandhi's foreign origins was an old issue and they would not raise it at this juncture when the priority is to install a secular government.

The Samajwadi Party has 36 MPs in the 14th Lok Sabha and Mr Pawar's NCP nine. Ms Gandhi will hold a meeting of the elected Congress deputies on Saturday when the Congress Parliamentary Party is expected to elect her the leader.