So Sharad Pawar has finally come out of the closet!!!

The intriguing episode of Pawar, P A Sangma and Tariq Anwar revolting against Sonia Gandhi in stressing that a foreigner (read Italian) should not become the Prime Minister of the country has thrown up some fascinating tidbits.

Since Jaal feeds on such scraps of information, we are more than thrilled to regurgitate them for you. Of course, a lot of it may be adulterated, but then consume at your own risk.

First, the letter which was formally sent by the brave trio to Sonia… It was written in pucca English something that is neither Pawar nor Anwar's forte and Sangma's tends to be more idiomatic. Pawar, of course, is only comfortable with Marathi and both English and Hindi are virtually Greek to him. Then who was the ghost who wrote? The rumour is that S Gurumurthy, leading light of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was the penman, who did his work at the Bhondsi ashram of former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar.

CS seems to be the mastermind behind this move (or perhaps the willing conduit for another CS - Chandraswami). He has carefully played upon the egos of two men who have more than enough of it to sate the entire nation - Pawar and Mulayam Singh Yadav. The connection? We'll come to that later.

Pawar was told that as a Congressman his aspirations to Prime Ministerhood were doomed. So he had to engineer a split in the Congress, wresting away the strong Maharashtra unit Thereby, he would sweep the Lok Sabha polls in the State and emerge as a regional chieftain in his own right. Thereafter, with another hung Parliament virtually certain, a Third Front would be constituted. That would include Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee's Trinamul Congress, the Telugu Desam Party, the Samata Party, the Samajwadi Party, among others. And Pawar would become its leader. And then the Prime Minister!!! Glory be!! Pawar, being the seniormost sucker in Indian politics has taken the bait, since it was offered by George Fernandes and Mulayam Singh Yadav (a Defence Minister's club…. Hmmm…. Why is that all those shady defence deals with megakickbacks never get investigated?).

But Pawar is the perfect patsy. Remember 19977? He was convinced by his cronies that he would roundly defeat Sitara Kesri in the election to become Congress president and subsequently, the Maratha was so badly humiliated that he slunk back to Baramati.

So who is actually pulling the strings? Certainly the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is so scared of Sonia Gandhi (God knows why?) that using the good offices of scruffy Chandra Shekhar, they have tapped the disgruntled in the Congress since at any given time, the Congress always has its healthy quota of the disgruntled. Gruntlement does not happen to be a part of the Congress culture. Among the others who have been contacted are former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao and Kesri.

Mulayam Singh Yadav is a willing accomplice. He wants the Congress crippled since otherwise he is on his way to oblivion in Uttar Pradesh. So he has gladly joined hands with the BJP. More than that, now he's even cosying up to the Shiv Sena. In early may, he slithered into Mumbai, hid in a hotel and met Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray and BJP leader Pramod Mahajan. An interesting turnaround. Now the self-appointed protector of the Babri Masjid is pals with the man who gloated when the structure came down and gave the credit for that achievement to his own cadre of demolition experts.

But more than being about strange bedfellows, isn't it about prostituting yourself?

In the process of this superb plot, Pawar da patsy is the fall guy. He'll get wiped out since his strategy of getting a quick expulsion from the party's not working. Sonia refuses to oblige and what's more, in resigning from her post, she has actually gained oodles of public sympathy.