New Delhi, May 10 :    New Delhi, May 10:  If the exit poll predictions in four states hold good, Sonia Gandhi's Congress may see itself on the comeback trail at the national level, but will be short of the steam needed for rapid acceleration. The DRS exit polls in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Assam point to the Congress as the sole winner among the national parties, leaving the BJP not much of an escape route to say that the mini-referendum has yielded at best a mixed verdict. Read closely, though, the Congress appears much less of a winner than it had possibly hoped to be. Only in Kerala is it projected to waltz to a comfortable victory, as expected, with 100 seats. At 60 in Assam, the forecast left it short of the majority mark of 64, though it should be able to form a government there with the help of others. That means a coalition with all its attendant instability and not the comfort of one-party rule. The last shot may not yet have been fired in the battle for Bengal, but unless the exit poll prediction there is way off the mark, it is difficult to see how the Congress-Trinamul alliance can achieve the impossible of dislodging the Left Front. As the party lodged a complaint with the Election Commission alleging large-scale rigging in Midnapore district, Congress leaders were expressing hopes of a sort of grand reunion. 'Even if we fail to make it in Bengal by a narrow margin, we are confident of getting stalwarts like Mamata Banerjee and G.K. Moopanar (in Tamil Nadu) back in the Congress parivar,' a CWC member said. Getting Moopanar, who has already hinted at homecoming, will be easier than achieving similar success with Mamata, and Congress leaders are aware of that. 'Let her decide. If she is keen on maintaining a separate identity, we will respect her sentiments. But if the two Congresses merge in Bengal, the Left will be wiped out,' the CWC member said. After the exit poll, expression of that confidence may sound somewhat hollow to Trinamul leaders like Ajit Panja who already has one foot in the BJP. He will interpret the result as vindication of his stand that parting with the BJP was a mistake. There are others in Trinamul who are prepared to listen to him. In order to get another chance to 'wipe out the Left', the alliance will have to wait another five years and that is too long a term to preclude possibilities of a realignment of forces. A defeat for Mamata could well be seen by at least a section in the BJP as a victory for the party since she dared to befriend the Congress. Subterranean efforts to woo Trinamul MPs back to the Vajpayee coalition might not remain all that secret. If the results do show that the BJP has played the spoiler for Mamata in Bengal by eating into Opposition votes, some of its leaders will derive the satisfaction of a dog in the manger. That the Congress, too, takes a blow in the process will be cause for further lip-smacking. What, however, could really help the BJP rubbish an almost inevitable Congress claim that the polls in four states had thrown up a verdict against the Vajpayee government is a minor change in the close result the exit poll has predicted in Tamil Nadu. The shocker has really come from the South with the prediction that Jayalalitha is getting 48 per cent of the votes and M. Karunanidhi's ruling DMK 47 per cent. The vote share gives the Jaya-Congress alliance (it has some other parties, too) 125 seats, seven beyond the majority mark, but the exit poll has a three percentage point margin of error. With the two sides' vote shares so close, even a tiny margin of error could see Karunanidhi back in the throne and the queen licking her wounds. If that happens, the BJP will get an opportunity to call the Tamil Nadu mandate a verdict for the National Democratic Alliance, of which the DMK is a part. Besides, the BJP is a constituent of the DMK-led combine in Tamil Nadu. Both the Congress and the BJP reacted cautiously to the projections. BJP spokesman V.K. Malhotra said: 'The exit poll seems to be more or less accurate in the case of Kerala but in Tamil Nadu we hope to do better. In Assam, the Congress seems to fall short of a majority so it needs to be seen if the other groups can come together with it. Regarding West Bengal, it is still unclear if the Left Front can get a majority.' Congress leader Kamal Nath said: 'The exit polls are not the last word. In any case, we were always confident of wresting Kerala and Assam and gaining a majority in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu with our allies.'