NEW DELHI, 25 November — Why did the BJP make Maneka Gandhi a minister? Numbers was a primary concern, a crucial determinant of value in a coalition government. Numbers were the reason why ministers eventually found less than competent were first given their jobs and then retained.

Maneka represents no one but herself.

An individual star then? With that ability which some politicians have to sway audiences with their oratory from Kerala to Bihar to Punjab to Bombay. The prime minister, for instance: when Atal Behari Vajpayee is in the mood he can pick up any audience and play with it as a child might play with a doll whose only response is "Mama ...Mama".

(These days the prime minister reserves such skills for either NRI gatherings in Washington or BJP gatherings in Amritsar.)

But Maneka is not, repeat not, an orator. The only leader in the Nehru-Gandhi family who was a true orator was Jawaharlal Nehru: he could speak on his feet because he would think all the time and read when he could. Indira Gandhi could never manage to distill the aroma of flowers into her phrases, although she more than made up with her confidence what she lacked in her language. No one could hammer a political theme, encapsulated in a few sentences, better than her. She had the power of a blacksmith rather than a goldsmith. The most evocative two-liner in the history of Indian democracy surely has to be the Indira staple of the 1971 general election: "Woh kehte hain Indira hatao. Main kehti hoon garibi hatao (They say remove Indira; I say remove poverty)!" Touché. Which land would not slide after that?

Maneka is more representative of the generation into which she married. Brevity is useful for this generation, because they do not have too much to say — unless it is written down for them. Sanjay Gandhi’s campaign speeches sounded like instructions from the legal guardian. Do this, do that. Vote for my five points. Sat Sri Akal. Jai Hind. Whatever.

Rajiv Gandhi had no flourish, and depended almost till the end on speech writers of dubious value, and, on occasion, counterproductive worth ("Naani yaad dila denge" etc. etc.).

Speech writers tend to have one peculiar characteristic. They cannot resist making fun of their patrons behind their backs. Some of Rajiv’s penmen would, partly to display their intellectual superiority and partly to advertise their proximity, leak out details like the exact number of minutes a particular speech would take.

Reporters with an inside tract would then time the arrival and departure of phrases in a speech at any rally from the safety of the press box, with much subdued hilarity on the sidelines. No man is a hero to his speech writer.

Brevity comes naturally to Maneka for more than one reason: she has so many other things to do. I have no idea how she meshed into the earnest-schoolboy, part-campaigner, part-bully culture of the Youth Congress during the Emergency and the Janata raj, but in middle age Maneka has become a maverick with a cause. Make that plural. A single cause would be insufficient for her energy levels. Such qualities would make her an excellent chief executive of a Norwegian-funded NGO. What are such passions doing in politics?

She is not in politics because she has deep ideological convictions, either Marxist or saffron. She is not in politics because her community wants her there, in the manner that Laloo Yadav or Mulayam Singh Yadav of Ram Vilas Paswan have built their base. If asked to identify her manifesto she would be a bit lost after she had gone beyond saving animals and forests. She belongs to no political party, and lives in a personal woodshed, in political terms. She cannot sway the electorate from Kerala to Kashmir. Of course she could turn around and say that everything in this paragraph applies to almost anyone you would meet in parliament, but Vajpayee does not make almost anyone you would meet in parliament a minister in his government. So why her?

The answer is family: the family Maneka married into. The BJP, or at least the prime minister, was using her to give added credibility to the coalition he had built. Maneka Gandhi brought with her a surname from Sanjay Gandhi, son of Indira, brother of Rajiv and grandson of Jawaharlal.

There were two brothers in the family, and therefore two daughters in law. Both the brothers met tragic, even savage ends. One died in a plane he could not control while still in his thirties. Rajiv was brutally assassinated in his prime, when he still had so much left to offer his country.

In between Indira Gandhi gave her life for India. As long as Rajiv was alive, there was no question of the political inheritance going to anyone else, whatever Maneka may have thought of his political abilities. But the moment he died, she was in business. She was helped by the fact that Sonia Gandhi opted for seven years of cloister. But her very presence prevented Maneka from joining the Congress. This was her Achilles heel. For the Nehru-Gandhi inheritance to work it must be routed through the Congress. That is non-negotiable.

On the other hand, Maneka did create some space for herself in the non-Congress, non-BJP region. It was not ideal, but it was significantly better than nothing, particularly at a time when the Congress was looking frayed from every angle: age, vision, clarity, thrust, relevance. When Sonia formally entered politics, the family acquired a presence in both camps.

For the BJP it made eminent sense to elevate Maneka to ministerial status: she, along with others like the old Socialists, helped dilute the extremism that the party had become synonymous with during the Ayodhya movement and its cataclysmic climax. The BJP wanted to reposition itself as the "natural" magnet of a moderate coalition, and such associates certainly helped it to govern from the center — both literally and politically. Maneka was the National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA’s) very own Nehru-Gandhi. And if she was, in her combustible way, vituperative about Sonia, why bother? She was not hurting the BJP by hurting Sonia.

So what happened? Why did the prime minister suddenly draw a sharp line last week and punished Maneka by removing the Culture Ministry from her portfolio when Maneka wanted to nudge Sonia out of one of the government-funded institutions that Sonia has, well, inherited?

Let us take the best reason possible. Simple, old-fashioned respect across party lines, in the finest traditions of a democratic polity. If this is true, then it is most welcome. Since he became prime minister, Vajpayee has certainly gone out of his way to ensure that all the privileges of office, like a bungalow and top grade security, are kept with Sonia and her daughter Priyanka even while Home Minister L.K. Advani has whittled away the privileges of former office bearers, including an ex prime minister like Chandra Shekhar.

If this is the real reason, then the BJP is a different party than it was when Rajiv was alive. No abuse, including personal abuse, was too harsh for Rajiv. The kind of atmosphere that was created against Rajiv was unprecedented in democratic politics. Sonia herself was fattened for the kill when, during the last general elections she seemed, briefly, as if she might offer a serious contest.

Why has the ruling alliance gone soft on Sonia now? One can understand the volte face of Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh, the man who stopped Sonia from being sworn in as prime minister when she claimed that she had the support of 272 MPs after the defeat of the Vajpayee government on the floor of the house. The same Amar Singh, who could not stand the thought of an Italian-born prime minister of India is now publicly asserting that this is a non-issue, and that he has himself killed the bill he brought in parliament to prevent any such possibility.

That volte face is the call of Uttar Pradesh, where his party will probably need the support of Sonia’s Congress to form the government in Lucknow. But the BJP can have no such understanding with Sonia. Surely not.

The only rational explanation is that the BJP continues to believe that the presence of Sonia as leader of the opposition is the best guarantee it has that its coalition will survive any crisis. The thought of Sonia as their potential prime minister, in other words, will keep the present BJP flock from wandering toward other pastures. The BJP knows that another wobble can be expected after the results of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. The BJP will lose in Uttar Pradesh, and Lucknow always casts a shadow on Delhi.

Destiny, in the meantime, has a habit these days of pushing Maneka toward the winning side of an election. She would have campaigned for the losing side if she had not been touched; now she will do the rounds of UP, but urge for a vote against the BJP government. The BJP would have lost in any case, but there is no harm in claiming some of the credit.

A drowning BJP has sent out a desperate SOS signal. For the BJP, of course, SOS can only stand for Save Our Sonia.