Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav's talk of early Lok Sabha polls to his party cadres shocked Congress leaders engaged in backroom talks for the last two weeks to rope in his party to join the United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre for giving it a stability to carry on till 2014.
Almost all of them are now convinced that inviting Mulayam in the government may bring more trouble as he may align with Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee to force mid-term polls whenever they want to. They now see force in Rahul Gandhi's 'Ekla-chalo'(go alone) policy to help the party regain the past glory.
They say the Congress has to put behind the shock of its severe drubbing in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections and continue with the outside support of SP and Bahujan Samaj Party. However, this will mean the government may not be able to take hard decisions to put the economy back on the rails.
A new thinking among those close to Congress President Sonia Gandhi is that Rahul's 'Ekla-chalo' policy should be experimented in the next Lok Sabha elections by the party contesting on its own, keeping the option of a coalition after the polls. This would mean that the party will not have to yield a number of seats to the allies, be it Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, Trinamool, Nationalist
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