what goes up must come down. In the BJP's case, it has come down with a thud. Just three months after it routed the Congress in the Gujarat assembly elections, the BJP found itself at the receiving end as Himachal Pradesh showed the door to the government led by P.K. Dhumal and voted the Congress to power.

ON A HIGH: Sonia celebrates the win

The after-effects of the BJP and the Congress exchanging places in the 68-member state Assembly-the Congress won 40 seats-did not take long to reach Delhi. The mood in Parliament, currently in budget session, witnessed a sea change with the Opposition suddenly becoming strident.

The Shimla verdict so lifted Congress President Sonia Gandhi's spirits that she let nothing-not even losing the decade-old Nagaland government or the loss of the Gauriganj assembly by-elections that falls in her Amethi parliamentary constituency-affect her. She became uncharacteristically combative, interrupting, perhaps for the first time, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was midway through a speech in the Lok Sabha. She mocked at his Government's inability to keep its electoral promise of creating one crore jobs a year.

Accounting for just four Lok Sabha seats, Himachal does not precisely have the numbers to propel Sonia to the top job. Yet the significance of a landslide win in the all-Hindu hill state cannot be minimised. "Himachal has shown that Hindutva does not work unless tainted with blood," says AICC General Secretary Kamal Nath. The Congress feel-good factor was further enhanced by its good showing in the by-elections. It wrested the Humnabad seat in Karnataka from the BJP; in the Bhokarden seat in Maharashtra, the party demonstrated that a pre-poll tie-up with the NCP could help the alliance take the seat from the BJP. In the North-east, the Congress managed to cut P.A. Sangma down to size, reducing the NCP to second place in his home state of Meghalaya.

The going won't be smooth for Lapang (left) and Rio

The Himachal victory couldn't have been more timely: it may just have helped avert an ideological crisis within the Congress which saw some senior party leaders advocating soft Hindutva. "We no longer have to worry about responding to Hindutva.We can now focus on refining our secular idiom," says a senior party functionary.

Party insiders say that henceforth those espousing soft Hindutva like Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh will be reined in and secularists like Arjun Singh, who see no need to accommodate Hindu sentiments, may be back in the reckoning. "We won't have to support a ban on cow slaughter or back the government in sorting out the temple tangle. The Gujarat debacle is firmly behind us," says a party MP.

The BJP, of course, prefers to treat the Himachal verdict as an aberration. Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley insists the polls were fought on local issues. National security and not Hindutva alone counts with the Himachal voters. "In the post-Kargil 1999 elections we led in 64 of the 68 assembly segments," he says. He feels the graft charges against Dhumal clinched the elections. Congress circles corroborate his observations and give due credit to Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh. "We won only because of Amarinder. Till he dug out the scam we had no campaign issue. The Gujarat results had buoyed the BJP cadre," says an AICC functionary.

In the next few months, the extent to which Hindutva will dominate electoral politics in the country will depend on the fate of the Ayodhya case in the apex court. For the moment, though by ordering excavation at the disputed site the Allahabad High Court has tilted the balance in its favour.

At the post-victory process of electing the state's new chief minister, Singh played his cards carefully to outwit the state Congress chief Vidya Stokes, a formidable opponent if only for the reason that she is known to be close to party President Sonia Gandhi. Shortly after it became clear that the Congress would oust the BJP from power, Stokes rushed to Delhi to win Sonia's backing.

Singh was smarter, opting to stay back in Shimla and managing to enlist the support of as many as 34 of the 40 Congress MLAs in the 68-member Assembly, including a few of Stokes' loyalists. Once it was clear that Singh had won the numbers game, the high command brokered a power-sharing deal between the rival factions by including Stokes and six of her hardcore loyalists in the Singh-led 16-member Cabinet.

Singh may have humbled Stokes in the race for leadership but the diminutive lady is not sitting back and licking her wounds. She has already wangled a crucial concession: she will wear two hats-that of a virtual No. 2 in the Singh ministry even as she continues as the PCC president. Allowing Stokes to call the shots in the party spells trouble for Singh as she can soon emerge as a parallel centre of power and a rallying point for his detractors. Singh admitted as much to India Today: "She has an unlimited capacity for intrigue." Clearly, the hatchet is far from buried, and it is a matter of time before the factional infighting erupts to keep Singh busy in matters other than governance.

Despite defusing Stokes' challenge, Singh has a tough job ahead. A severe resource crunch made worse by a Rs 15,000-crore debt burden means that Singh will have no option but to go in for more borrowings to keep the public ire at bay, at least till the next Lok Sabha polls. Luckily for him, the Congress has made no populist promises involving big finances.

Singh can also draw comfort from the fact that the opposition BJP is in total disarray and demoralised after the electoral debacle. At the moment, Singh has made the anti-corruption tirade and generation of employment as his priorities. Having used the corruption plank to defeat the BJP, Singh will be tempted to push his opponents to the wall by initiating inquiries into the P.K. Dhumal regime. Given that Singh had faced the heat in three cases involving misuse of power and fraud instituted against him by the previous regime, the Congress Government has vowed to go the whole hog in investigating the "scandals" of his political opponents. "It will not be a witch-hunt but the issue of corruption will be not sidetracked," says Singh.

But Singh will have to worry more about his tenuous truce with Stokes who will be waiting in the wings to get even with him. The 'Raja' may have outmanoeuvred his political foe in the first round, but the last word on the power tussle in the hill state is yet to be heard.

VOTED OUT: The BJP sees the Himachal verdict as an aberration

Rio knows that unless he treads carefully, Nagaland could see a civil war situation with rival NSCN factions engaged in fratricidal feuds. Reconciliation is Rio's catchword. He can't perform or move ahead without it.

If the impact of Naga insurgency was reflected in the Nagaland verdict, the mandate in Tripura is seen as a vote against violence. The Left Front, led by the CPI(M), performed a hat-trick, winning the elections three times in a row since 1993 and returning to power for the fifth time. With 41 seats in its kitty, the Marxists gave a severe drubbing to the Congress and its tribal ally, the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura, which together bagged just 19 seats in the 60-member state Assembly.

Meghalaya saw another fractured verdict. Congressman D.D. Lapang heads a six-party coalition government with the support of 42 members in the 60-member House. Predictably, 38 of them are ministers. The Congress, with 22 seats, emerged as the single largest party. The other key player, the NCP, followed with 14. It was a clear signal that NCP leader and former Lok Sabha Speaker P.A. Sangma may have been marginalised in his state's politics.