Prakash Karat with Mayavati in Delhi on Sunday soon after claiming the backing of several small parties. (below) Samajwadi Party leader Ramgopal Yadav showing off Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh (bearded), a BJP MP who pledged support to the UPA. (Ramakant Kushwaha, PTI)

New Delhi, July 20: The Lok Sabha is headed for one its bitterest showdowns following a week’s sordid one-upmanship for numbers and a radical political realignment that has taken the focus off the contentious nuclear deal and pitched the next general election centrestage.

The UPA and its adversaries — the NDA and the Left-UNPA combine — put up respective shows of strength around elaborate lunch and dinner tables on the eve of the trust vote, each more adamant in claiming the upper hand, each anxious whether their backs were covered.

Prakash Karat and Mayavati announced mid-afternoon after winning over Deve Gowda and Ajit Singh, that the UPA and the nuclear deal were “doomed”. “We will bring down this government on the 22 nd and meet the next day to chart our future political course,” an ebullient Karat announced following a luncheon with Left and UNPA leaders at Telugu Desam leader Yerran Naidu’s house.

Amar Singh flung his counter-blast within hours, speaking with 34 Samajwadi MPs and one BJP rebel — UP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh — on his flanks. “We are not doomed, Comrade Karat, we have bloomed. I am presenting one crossover from the BJP. My party is intact, our opponents should worry about how safe they are. Aur bahut band lifafe hain jo 22 ko khulenge aur aap dang rah jaayenge (There are many more closed envelopes which will open on the 22 nd and leave you stunned.)”

On paper, the UPA is still about 10 short of the required number, but as Amar Singh pointedly hinted, covert support has become as critical to its calculations as its overt strength. The ruling alliance is banking as much on last-minute defections from the NDA ranks as on abstentions on the day of the vote. Among the formations it claims to have “ensured” abstentions from are the BJP, Shiv Sena, BJD and the Akali Dal.

Confident of tiding over, a UPA manager said: “When the vote finally happens, you’ll see how comfortable we really were despite all this talk of a close race. It is close on paper, but we are confident we are cushioned.” Railway minister Lalu Yadav, often given to hyperbole, claimed a strength of 291; he wouldn’t reveal how he’d arrived at that astounding total, for tactical reasons, of course.

By the Lok Sabha’s current strength, the half-way mark stands at 271; the UPA’s political managers are hopeful that they will be able to bring the effective victory mark down to around 265 by engineering abstentions.

The contenders made contrary, often unverifiable, claims of arithmetical advantage and traded acrimonious charges. Karat alleged the Congress-SP combine had “betrayed the nation and secularism” and was “desperately using money power” in it bid to survive.

Amar responded with a sarcastic riposte: “I think I must congratulate Comrade Karat and Comrade Bardhan for their progressive move of making Narendra Modi’s friend, Mayavati, their leader. This is an opportunistic alliance and it shows their commitment to secularism.”

As insinuation and invective flew thick in the capital’s charged political air, the floor of the Lok Sabha itself remained a slippery place. With barely months to go for their term, MPs have found it easier to invent respectable veneers and switch loyalties. Some because they fear being denied a ticket, others because delimitation has squeezed them out of their current seats, yet others for reasons all too old and familiar: inducement.

JMM leader Shibu Soren, for one, made no bones about why he had finally left the fence and cast his weight of five MPs behind the UPA. After meetings with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, Soren felt reasonably assured he would be given a cabinet berth with the coal portfolio at the Centre. He has also bagged the promise of a minister of state and Jharkhand’s deputy chief ministership for his son.

The deal with the JMM illustrates the UPA’s growing desperation in the face of the Opposition’s mounting assault to bring it down.

Two nights ago, the Congress core committee had categorically ruled out a cabinet expansion “before or after” the trust vote. The difficulty with numbers however loosened the government’s “principled” façade; highly placed sources had conceded the possibility of ministerial berths being on offer yesterday when they said there were no expansion plans “as of now”.

The crafty Soren’s hard bargain finally broke through the morality show and showed up realpolitik for what it is.

Unlike Soren, though, Ajit Singh slipped away with his group of three despite having sought and received sops from the government. The cabinet’s decision to rename the Lucknow airport after his father Chaudhary Charan Singh didn’t weigh quite enough.

Ajit Singh’s decision, in fact, illustrates why the next election is weighing on this trust vote more than the pros and cons of the nuclear deal. A small but ambitious player in Uttar Pradesh, Ajit Singh has made a choice positioning his prospects in the 15 th Lok Sabha well over his options in the 14 th .

As he himself said after shaking hands with Mayavati, “Elections are near and naturally everybody is worried what will happen then. I am not sure we will get our fair share in a deal with the Congress, which is being dominated by the Samajwadi Party. This vote is not only about the nuclear deal, it is about our political future itself.”

As Manmohan Singh prepares for what’s probably the biggest test of his political career, those words will probably ring sardonically true for the Prime Minister as well; this vote is as much about his future as Ajit Singh’s.