Inside story of how Rahul Gandhi dropped the ordinance bomb on UPA govt

New Delhi: Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi's sudden denunciation of the UPA govt's draft ordinance protecting convicted MPs and MLAs on Friday was not an on-the-spur reaction. The scripting of this was done on Thursday itself, when the President Pranab Mukherjee raised some red flags on the ordinance. Rahul Gandhi's backroom boys Murli Deora, Sachin Pilot, Madhusudan Mistry, chief of staff Kanishka Singh and new entrant Ajay Maken had huddled together at 11, Tughlak Lane on Thursday itself to chalf out a plan to project the Gandhi scion as "a clean leader" before the electorate, with elections in four crucial states round the corner. On Thursday evening, the top BJP leaders led by L K Advani and Sushma Swaraj had met the President objecting to the ordinance, and by Friday morning, Rahul Gandhi's letter to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh questioning the ordinance was drafted. The letter was immediately sent to the Prime Minister's office, and harried officials at the PMO immediately faxed it to the Indian embassy in Washington, hours before Dr Singh was due to meet US president Barack Obama. It was later after midnight in Washington, when the Rahul 'bombshell' reached the PM's aides. By that time, Murlia Deora and his supporter Priya Dutt had already tweeted their opposition to the ordinance. And then, the core team of Rahul decided to drop the bombshell. It so happened, that Ajay Maken, head of Congress media department, had agreed for a Meet the Press at the Press Club of India on Raisina Road three days ago, and Rahul's advisers thought, this was the right time and place to drop the bombshell. The timing was of the essence: The bombshell was dropped exactly two days before Narendra Modi was due to address a huge BJP rally at Japanese Park in Delhi's Rohini (Sunday), and was expected to slam the government on this ordinance issue. The second message that had gone was that Manmohan Singh government's days are numbered. The bombshell did the trick, but not before BJP leaders had a whale of time making fun of the Congress and the Gandhi scion. By evening, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke to Sonia Gandhi, and the Congress president tried to assuage his hurt feelings. The government decided that the draft ordinance will be taken back from Rashtrapati Bhavan. Political pundits say, Rahul Gandhi could have done this secretly by calling in Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram and asked them to withdraw the ordinance, but the "drama" was felt necessary, to send a strong message to the people that Rahul professed "clean politics". Political satirists compared Rahul's "grandstanding" with that of Modi touching the feet of Advani. On one hand, Rahul slammed the ordinance as "nonsense" and "fit to be torn and thrown away", but sent a letter to Manmohan Singh saying he had full respect for his sagacity, and on the other hand, Narendra Modi marshalled his supporters to upstage Advani in the prime ministerial stakes, and then touched his feet to seek his blessings. And, this is what Indian politics is all about.