In As an armyman-turned-politician, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh believes there are many similarities between fighting an election and fighting a war. "A candidate, like a soldier, has to be one step ahead in order to outmanoeuvre the adversary," he says, drawing on one of his favourite books, Nigel Hamilton's Monty, the biography of legendary British general Bernard Montgomery.

BACK FIRE: Amarinder's smear campaign seems to have rebounded on him

His belief was buttressed by his triumph in the Punjab elections last year; but in the run-up to the February 26 assembly polls in neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, where he is virtually in charge of the Congress campaign, it seems to have boomeranged. Midway through a highly charged and controversial campaign, his overdrive to bolster the party's chances triggered a no-holds-barred slugfest between the Congress and the BJP. Never before has the state witnessed such a low-level and such a highly personalised election campaign, leading to the unprecedented spectacle of the chief ministers of three states-Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat-facing a flurry of civil and criminal suits.

With Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal slapping two defamation and damage suits on him in Shimla, Amarinder now has the dubious distinction of being the only chief minister to have invited half a dozen defamation cases from his political opponents in the past one year.

While the Congress went hammer and tongs against the BJP chief minister Dhumal on the issue of corruption, the BJP unleashed a torrent of sleaze charges against the Congress. Ironically, it is not the Himachal Congress leaders but those from neighbouring Punjab who now find themselves at the receiving end of the BJP tirade.

It was Gujarat Home Minister Amrit Shah who upped the ante on February 16 by disclosing the "involvement" of three Congress leaders-Punjab Public Works Department Minister Partap Singh Bajwa, Revenue Minister Amarjit Singh Samra and Delhi MLA Arvinder Singh Lovely-in a call-girl racket busted by the Ahmedabad police. The charge was endorsed and played up by the state Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

Thrown virtually off-balance by the Modi bouncer at the peak of the election campaign, the Congress was quick to mount a damage-control exercise. The beleaguered ministers filed a criminal complaint of defamation against Modi in a Jalandhar court, while threatening to slap a Rs 100-crore damage suit. But far from being unnerved, Modi started his election campaign in Himachal Pradesh by adding insult to the injury-he released the photographs of the Punjab ministers in the company of the detained call-girl.

CHIEF DIVERSION: With Dhumal being the target of Amarinder's allegations, development issues took a back seat in the campaign

The reason for Amarinder's overzealous campaigning is not difficult to understand. Buffeted by charges of a below-par performance and dogged by a sex scandal involving his top bureaucrats, Amarinder saw in the Himachal elections an opportunity to salvage his reputation in the eyes of Congress President Sonia Gandhi. The high command had initially spurned Amarinder's Himachal ad-campaign strategy with its shrill focus on corruption. But later the party, desperate to win the elections, bought the "corruption dope" Amarinder had dug up against Dhumal by deputing a team of Punjab Vigilance Department officials to investigate the Himachali leader's family's properties in Jalandhar.

Himachal Congress leaders had tacitly disapproved of Amarinder's rough-and-ready tactics and warned that these could well recoil. Bir Devinder Singh, senior Congress MLA and a trenchant critic of Amarinder, puts it bluntly: "Given Amarinder's negative image, allowing him a key role in the Himachal elections was a mistake."

Adding to the Congress' discomfiture was the firebrand BJP leader Madan Lal Khurana's resurrection of a decade-old controversy on Amarinder's alleged dalliance with a woman pilot. "Let Amarinder explain his relationship with this woman. Is she his sister or daughter?" asked an acerbic Khurana, exhibiting photographs related to the controversy. In 1992 the woman's father had written to the then Punjab chief minister Beant Singh of the Congress, seeking help in the recovery of his daughter from "Maharaja" clutches.

The rash of defamation suits has raised the larger question of the legal accountability of politicians in making libellous charges during campaigning. The centrepiece of Amarinder's tirade in the 2002 Punjab elections was an allegation that the then chief minister Parkash Singh Badal had amassed wealth worth Rs 350 crore. It's a different matter that Amarinder is yet to unearth Badal's properties or prove his allegation; he has even backtracked on his promise to set up a judicial commission on corruption in the Akali regime. Amarinder ended up facing four civil and criminal cases of defamation filed by Badal and his son Sukhbir Singh. "Amarinder has taken advantage of the slow and long-winding judicial process to make slanderous charges," says Badal's nephew, MLA Manpreet Singh Badal. A case in point is the damage suits for Rs 5 crore each and two criminal complaints against Amarinder that have made little headway.

Former BJP MP and senior lawyer Satya Pal Jain advocates the enactment of a deterrent law to curb the growing tendency among politicians to level derogatory allegations and get away with it. "By the time the defamation cases mature after years, the damage is done," he says.

Given the bitter legal battles it triggered between the Congress and the BJP in Himachal Pradesh, the assembly election in the hill state will go down as one that saw political morality slip from the gutter into the sewer.