New Delhi, July 14: If there’s one person the Congress is sorely missing, it’s Priya Ranjan Das Munshi.

With a week left for the trust vote, it’s time to crunch numbers and sew up loose ends. And the Union minister, in hospital after a heart attack, is the closest the Congress has to the late Pramod Mahajan, the BJP’s man for all seasons and reasons who could be counted on to pull an ace from his sleeve when required.

It was Das Munshi’s pro- activism that saw the UPA sail smoothly through the elections for the President and Vice-President last year. Despite the fact that the NDA went for the kill, using means fair and foul.

Das Munshi may not be gifted with Pramod Mahajan’s wiles and guiles but the party despaired when it learnt that those asked to calculate and classify Lok Sabha MPs into the “sure”, “probable” and “against” categories got their basic math wrong.

The first list drawn up by a minister inflated the Congress and the Samajwadi Party numbers and downplayed those of the NDA. When it was cross-checked, 11 names mysteriously vanished.

Neither of this might have happened had Das Munshi — doctors in Calcutta said he would be released this week — been around.

Since then, the number crunchers have made a more realistic estimate. Officially, party spokespersons have been asked to say the UPA has 280 votes — eight more than the majority mark of 272.

Privately, the Congress is cautiously optimistic of surviving the trust vote but have little idea of what’s in store later. Few have had the time to ruminate over the events of the past month. Before they knew what hit them, the Prime Minister announced he would go ahead with the nuclear deal, come what may.

“This much I can say, we have lost the stability the Left gave us all these years. Now, it’s a case of ‘aa bail mujhe maar’ (roughly translated as ‘we are wilfully inviting trouble’). With hindsight, we may say one day it was unnecessary,” an office-bearer said.

Until last week, the Congress sat complacent, thinking none but the BSP wanted an early election. Certainly not the Left, stung as it was by the setbacks in local body elections in Bengal. So, Prakash Karat was isolated in the political spectrum, it thought.

But Karat’s tête-à-tête with Mayavati changed all that. None in the Congress quite knew what to make of the zeal with which Karat churned the political cauldron and what the BSP-Left equation could mean for future realignments.

As of now, there are two prongs to the Congress’s plan: a) continue working on small parties, size up demands and see which can be “realistically” conceded; b) depend on abstentions from the BJD, Akali Dal and even the BJP.