Within the week we should know whether there is a challenger to Sonia Gandhi from within the ranks of the Congress. The media has identified the Congress Don Quixote, but the potential candidate remains remarkably coy, preferring the politics of dark hints to that of open confrontation. There is some speculation that the circulation of letters to all and sundry is no more than a ploy for securing something in return for finally not entering the lists. Whether there will be any takers for such a ploy also remains to be seen. A challenger would add to the excitement of the chase but make no material difference to the outcome. The Congress is usually damned as having no tradition of inner party democracy, but the fact is that in all the party elections of the Nineties there have been challengers. Sharad Pawar took on P.V. Narasimha Rao after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination; Arjun Singh was the target when the Congress working committee elections in Tirupati in 1992 did not go Rao's way; Sharad Pawar returned to the fray when Sitaram Kesri put in for chairman of the parliamentary party in addition to president of the party in early 1997; later the same year, Rajesh Pilot and Sharad Pawar mounted a somewhat eccentric attempt to dethrone Kesri in the party polls; and Sonia Gandhi became chairperson of the parliamentary party only after she had beaten off Pawar's determined effort to secure the position for himself. So, if there is a challenge to Sonia Gandhi later this week, it will be something of a yawn. There is no Sohrab to her Rustom, no David to her Goliath. While a challenger might give an opportunity to the inveterate Nehru/Gandhi-haters to go in for a spot of fantasy, Sonia Gandhi's own reelection is assured. What a challenge will do is provide an opportunity for a public discussion of what ails the party - and what does not. This, in the normal course, would be welcome. Yet, I fear, going by Jitendra Prasada's letter, nothing constructive, nothing imaginative, nothing innovative will come out of a public airing of Prasada's private grievances. His letter is cliché-ridden. Every point he has made has been addressed in detail in the report of the all India Congress committee's introspection committee, chaired by everybody's favourite Congressman, A.K. Antony. To my eternal regret, the Congress president has chosen to keep the full 300-page report under wraps, but within days of its submission she convened the CWC to discuss the substance of the report. It was probably the longest yet CWC session during her tenure as Congress president. Jitendra Prasada, as the elected (not nominated) member of the CWC with the second largest number of votes (after Ahmed Patel), was an active participant in that discussion. Also, as a CWC member he had the right of full access to the whole or any part of the report, as he chose. For reasons best known to him, he has preferred the route of setting out his grievances rather than redressing them. Perhaps the problem is that notwithstanding his eminence in Congress politics for all of the past decade, beginning with his induction as political advisor to Congress president, Rajiv Gandhi, in early 1990, Prasada has remained something of a hot-house plant. This had everything to do with the Congress party's declining fortunes in Uttar Pradesh, where the party has plummeted from 84 out of 85 seats in 1984 to single digit figures through the whole of the following decade. At the state level, the Bharatiya Janata Party was initially driven out by the voters in 1993 in reaction to the Babri Masjid outrage of the previous year, but the Congress was not able to glide into the vacated space. On the contrary, it was Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayavati who emerged as the main gladiators on the UP stage. Later, in the 1996 assembly elections, Pra- sada's attempt to work in tandem with Ma- yavati ended in an unexpectedly small Congress presence in the assembly. Worse, much worse, the handful of Congress members of legislative assembly then split with many of those most ardently backed by Prasada breaking off to form the Loktantrik Congress and joining hands with the BJP (of all parties) to maintain an uncertain toe-hold in the government of UP. While Prasada happily won back his own Lok Sabha seat in last year's elections, the Congress in UP remained in the woods. The regional quarrel between him and his successor in UP is of little concern to the rest of the country. Therefore, Prasada jumps into the ring not as a 10,000-burst lari but something of a damp squib. What amazes me is his assertion that fear grips the party and its workers are being intimidated into silence. This is rubbish. It was only a few months ago that his close political associate, Begum Noor Bano, stood for election to an important parliamentary party post. She almost won. There was no intimidation, no attempt to turn votes away from her, indeed quite a campaign to lure Congress members of parliament into backing her because she was the only woman candidate. If she did not win, it was because she fell short marginally of the required number of votes; that she came so near winning proof positive that 10, Janpath is no Stalinist Kremlin. In fact the master of intimidation is Prasada himself. That is what made him so invaluable to P.V. Narasimha Rao. When somebody had to be ticked off or brought back to the straight and the narrow, Prasada was the man to do it. He had ample support from Matang Sinh and Bhuvanesh Chaturvedi. After Rao's fall from grace, Sinh and Chaturvedi were eliminated, leaving the field entirely to Prasada. He always reminded me of John D. Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, the duo who twisted the Republican Party's arm to get Richard Nixon's will done. There is nothing crude or rough about Prasada's style of intimidation. He is an extremely urbane, sophisticated, well- educated man, perfectly bilingual, aristocratic in bearing, and understated in tenor. Unlike me, he has a studied control over his language and uses words as a stiletto, not a blunderbuss. He had been tasked by Kesri at the August 1997 session of the AICC in the Netaji Indoor Stadium, Calcutta, to eliminate from the list of candidates for the CWC elections those whom Kesri did not favour. I was among them. My chances of winning were remote. I judged it my democratic right to measure my strength by contesting, whether I won or no. Minutes before the deadline for withdrawal of nominations, I was subjected to the Prasada brand of intimidation. It was made clear to me that the act of contesting would amount to defiance of Kesri and, more to the point, defiance of Prasada, the consequences of which would be terminal to my political ambitions. The atmosphere was like an encounter with 'the Godfather'. I did not flinch. I contested. And did unexpectedly well. Let us see how Jitendra Prasada stands up.