On March 26, as the 10-hour extraordinary joint sitting of the Parliament to consider and pass the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, 2002, drew to a close, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rushed to the Central Hall to make a last minute intervention. No, he didn’t want to record his support for the bill for posterity. He didn’t say a word on poto. Instead, he stood to defend his honour. And the provocation was Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s rather innocuous suggestion that it was his “moment of reckoning” and that he had to choose between the duty of his high office and the internal pressures of his party and its sister organisations.

“I cannot and will not stand personal accusations against me,” Vajpayee warned, implying the leader of the Opposition was out of sync with parliamentary protocol. He had after all begun his parliamentary career in 1957, when she was “miles away from politics”. He even made light of her inability to speak without a written text, an aspect that came into focus there and then. Sonia relied on colleague Arjun Singh to rebut the prime minister’s charges. Thereafter, the heated day-long debate collapsed into a personality battle between the veteran and the greenhorn.

This was not the first time that Vajpayee had substituted argument with rage or pitted his experience against Sonia’s lack of it. Whenever in crisis, he has clambered for the moral high ground. In the past year, he used his “impeccable” half-century in public life at least three times to ward off criticism. In May 2001, he told the Lok Sabha that he was afraid not of “death but of infamy”. When the Tehelka tapes showed then bjp president Bangaru Laxman taking money, Vajpayee countered, “I don’t need a certificate of patriotism. I have spent my life fighting corruption”.

Yet Vajpayee’s latest, poto-inspired, verbal bout with Sonia did not go down well with political leaders, including those in his own party. The consensus was that he had either overreacted to Sonia’s speech or feigned rage to score a debating point. “True, Sonia could have avoided making a personal comment. But then Vajpayee could have ignored it. Why, no one even noticed the offence until he spoke,” said a senior bjp politician.

Echoed former prime minister Chandra Shekhar: “I was surprised by Vajpayee’s reaction. He was not his usual self. Something was amiss.” JD(U) leader D.P. Yadav, an nda partner, blamed it on the prime minister’s age, adding, “He was upset because he felt Sonia had questioned his integrity.”

Later, worried aicc officebearers met to assess the fallout of the prime ministerial reprimand. The party, however, recovered the following day when it swept the Municipal Corporation of Delhi elections. It described the civic poll result, in effect, as a no confidence vote against the prime minister.

“Vajpayee has lost state after state. What mandate is he talking about?” asked Congress spokesman S. Jaipal Reddy. He dismissed Vajpayee’s outburst as an attempt to “reinstate himself within his constituency and cover up the nda’s misdeeds”. If a (half)-witty Congress MP dismissed Vajpayee as a “petty survivor who pretends to be a statesman”, aicc General Secretary Kamal Nath observed, “He is now too used to sycophancy. He can’t take any criticism.”

Congress circles are, however, apprehensive that the Government might hereafter target Sonia. “So far the Government has been treating her with kid gloves,” said a party leader. “Now the gloves are off.” The reason is not just Sonia’s televised row with Vajpayee but the general atmosphere of acrimony pervading political discourse. The joint sitting of Parliament had decisively polarised national politics. You could call it the POTO effect.

—Lakshmi Iyer