The party goes ahead to put him up closest to Amethi, in Rae Bareli, where he can constantly provide the needle to irritate Sonia. When another former Rajiv Gandhi friend, Arun Singh, is also discovered in a Himalayan retreat, he too becomes an irresistible find for the BJP. What is so good about them except that they were once Rajiv Gandhi's friends?

Not that the BJP is bereft of talent. What it wants is to show that it has the capacity to attract Rajiv's old-friends-turned-enemies. All this is meant totrouble Sonia's ego. But, if the BJP gets to have a majority, it announces, it will do its best to see that Sonia, with her foreign origin, doesn't get a chance to try again. How very manly for the BJP's own ego!

This leads the people to ask: why are they so scared of Sonia Gandhi?They have someone to stand at the doorstep of Amethi to gloat: ``We also have found someone from the dynasty!'' In the best marketing tradition, they show an impressive man supposedly to put fear into all bystanders. Having talked about Sonia's foreign origin, everyone acclaims that Arun Nehru is from Jensen and Nicholson, the dyemasters also of foreign origin. If they pick up Bofors to criticise Sonia, they also display someone's role in having got the Babri Masjid doors opened. Very good credentials!

In fact, all this amounts to a tribute to Sonia Gandhi. Their apparent fright makes out as if she, despite the universal admiration for Atal Behari Vajpayee, is going to raid their vote banks and run away with victory. Why, oh,why is the BJP so scared of Sonia in the hour they are celebrating as their own? Is it that no one, friend or foe, can wish away the Nehru-Gandhi parivar? That is why it has both the Aruns, Nehru and Singh of the Rajiv fame.

Does it put Sonia off guard? She may not say it but must be thinking that it was one of her mother-in-law's greatest mistakes to have gone one day in 1980 to Rae Bareli and introduced Arun Nehru to an election crowd with the words: ``Yeh Pappu hai, hamare parivar ka (This is Pappu of our family).'' Rajiv Gandhi must also have remembered these words when the promising Pappu revolted against him when he was at his weakest to pull him down. But the gentleman in Rajiv, whatever his weak points, never said a word.

What kind of a parivar the Nehru-Gandhis are that it produces such Pappus? And what kind of a dynasty that even the BJP parivar finds it useful to nibble at?

The Pappu of 1980 is already at it, something that the lesser mortals of the BJP find so endearing. He hasalready called for a referendum on the Sonia citizenship issue. ``To become an Indian citizen at 35 and then prime minister at 50. It is for the public to make a decision; there should be a referendum on what we want.'' This should be like music to anti-Sonia ears. The BJP should be very happy that a recent convert has started off so promisingly. No one in the Sonia camp would have the wit to ask what it is to be Rajiv's ally in 1985, two years later an enemy and 13 years more a BJP candidate. He recalls the time he was fighting as a Jan Morcha candidate -- ``as for my joining the BJP, I took their help when I contested from Bilhaur in 1989''. V.P. Singh, did you know that?

After this you cannot blame the BJP when it devotes its manifesto to explaining how it would bend its energies to prevent Sonia Gandhi from trying to ever become prime minister. Pappuji has already called for a referendum. And now Sushma is trying it in Bellary in a tricolour sari. Everyone wants to know that, even if the Congress isreturned to power, would the party elect her to become prime minister. She has said that the parliamentary party would elect its own leader. It could be her; it could be Manmohan Singh; it could also be a third person. Every Pappu in India knows these rules of democracy.

The point is about the BJP scoring points not on politics but on its finding Rajiv Gandhi's friends and making them work for it and almost saying: ``Look, these boys from the dynasty are now ours!''. They may be highly intelligent people but that is not what seems to matter with the BJP. For the BJP their sole qualification in the monsoon of 1999 is that they were once close to the Nehru-Gandhi parivar when from non-entities as cousins and classmates and mere boxwallahs they became national figures. Why does the straightforward BJP go for this? It always used to fight for hard political points. But there are certain advantages to this course. It has already led Sonia Gandhi into making statements which the people didn't expect from her,like saying in Allahabad that her critics don't know what ``stuff'' she was made of. People think of her as a calm, sober person, not of the ``stuff'' that verbal wrestlers are made of. No one ever expects Vajpayee to talk this kind of ``stuff''. For instance, you will notice that he has never launched a personal attack on Sonia Gandhi.

When Arun Singh offered his services to the government, another sober BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, quickly grabbed the opportunity. And why not? Arun Singh was a ``friend'', said Jaswant Singh. It was not the talent that the BJP was looking for but the needles to put into Sonia's flesh. Having been a friend of the Nehru-Gandhi parivar has suddenly become a great qualification. This immediately attracts attention.

Good that Arun Singh has not gone over to the Defence Ministry, where in his last assertion he had demanded that Bofors should be blacklisted. By now he would have known that this should not be done because Bofors guns have done such good work in Kargil that we hadto speedily find parts replacements.

What does all this prove? That Rajiv Gandhi had collected certain people whom the BJP finds invaluable in times of its need. No, he didn't collect such a bad crowd. Only that when you are in a bad way, they can leave you for farm houses and later walk into other pastures. True, they are Congress discards, in the sense that if they wanted to find a place around Sonia Gandhi, they would not have been welcome.

The other point is that under Vajpayee they all find an umbrella under which all kinds of people, from J. H. Patel to Arun Nehru, find comfort. This nobody can dispute, especially if the welcome comes with the hope of winning Rae Bareli and, more important, needling Sonia.

The writer is a former Resident Editor of The Indian Express