By IPS Correspondents
LUCKNOW, Uttar Pradesh, Jan 19 2006 (IPS)

Wild as they sound, allegations of phone-tapping made against the ruling Congress party and its Italian-born chief Sonia Gandhi, by leaders of several regional parties, seem to be connecting.

Leading the attack is the Samajwadi Party (SP), that rules the populous and politically crucial state of Uttar Pradesh- which the Congress has not ruled since 1990 and must reclaim in order to retain its standing as India’s pre-eminent political party.

But many obstacles hinder a Congress return to Uttar Pradesh, seat of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty and hub of India’s freedom movement against British colonial rule that started in the late 19th century and fructified in 1947.

One obstacle for the Congress has been the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, under the Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) and centred around the town of Ayodhya where Hindu zealots tore down the mediaeval Babri Masjid mosque in 1992, stoking enmity between the Hindu and Muslim communities in the state and polarizing the polity.

Simultaneously, horizontal divisions have occurred in the state with a rising clamour for a share of the political cake by subaltern classes that have reposed their faith in the power of electoral politics and in leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav, leader of the SP and presently chief minister of Uttar Pradesh.

And now Yadav’s henchman and SP general secretary Amar Singh has nailed the phone-tapping on the Congress and also roped in other powerful regional politicians to echo his allegations – notably Jayaraman Jayalalithaa, chief minister of southern Tamil Nadu and Chandrababu Naidu who leads the opposition in the Andhra Pradesh state.

But worst of all, for the Congress party, Sitaram Yechury, a parliamentarian from the Communist Party of India- Marxist(CPI-M )-an ally on which the minority Congress party depends to stay in power-has also come out with allegations that his telephone too was being tapped.

Expectedly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has dismissed the allegations against the person of Sonia Gandhi and underlined the police version that the tapping was carried out by a private detective agency rather than the government. But an enquiry has been ordered.

Says political analyst Neerja Chowdhary: ” Despite the potentially-damaging facets of the telephone-tapping controversy, one will have to wait because it is yet to play itself out.” She said much would depend on what position the Congress and the SP finally take on their mutual relations. (The Congress supports the SP-led provincial government in Uttar Pradesh while the SP supports the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government at the centre.

Meanwhile, the political eavesdropping issue refuses to go away and Amar Singh has taken the matter to the Supreme Court.

Interrogation by the police of arrested private eye Bhupinder Singh has unearthed significant evidence that electronic eavesdropping has indeed been taking place – though it is yet to be revealed at whose behest.

The fact that the police has made no furrther revelation lends credence to the theory that heavyweight politicians in the ruling party may indeed be involved, as Amar Singh and other top regional politicians allege.

Congress party activists have been demonstrating in front of Amar Singh’s bungalow, heaping abuse on him for what they see as an attempt to smear the name of their party chief, Sonia Gandhi.

But Congress managers cannot lose sight of the fact that the party has high stakes in Uttar Pradesh whose 170 million people dwarf the populations of many countries in the world. Or that both Sonia Gandhi and her son and likely political heir, Rahul Gandhi, have their parliamentary constituencies in the state.

It must also worry Congress bosses that the party has, for decades now, been out of power not only in Uttar Pradesh but also adjacent Bihar and West Bengal. Together these states, strung out along the Ganges river, account for a third of India’s parliamentary seats and forms the country’s political heartland.

But the Congress party’s efforts at retrieving Uttar Pradesh has received another setback with the re-surfacing, this month, of the Bofors kickbacks scam, which rocked the government led by Rajiv Gandhi (Sonia’s assassinated husband ) in 1989 and triggered the party’s steady political decline.

This latest jolt has come in the form of revelations by a television channel that a government emissary had flown to Britain to request the unfreezing of accounts held there by Ottavio Quattrochhi, Italian businessman, close friend of the Gandhis and alleged beneficiary in the Bofors artillery deal.

Soon after Quattrochhi fled India in 1993, the country’s premier sleuthing agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has been seeking his extradition through Interpol and got his accounts in London frozen.

And now opposition parties are questioning the propriety of unfreezing Quattrocchi’s bank accounts (which contained about five million dollars) while a case against him by the CBI is still pending.

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