The Congress Drama continues...hours before she was to be sworn in, Sonia Gandhi has refused to become the prime minister of the country - ostensibly because she does not want the issue of her foreign origin to create problems for the party once it takes the power seat. Now the entire nation is poised on the edge of its seat to figure out who will be the new PM - Pranab Mukherjee or Manmohan Singh??

This, I must say, is a totally unexpected turn of events. After the bloodbath at the stock markets yesterday - where the Sensex fell by over 800 points for the first time in history - the sentiment against the Congress-led government was very, very strong.

The market collapsed because of large-scale pullouts by the FIIs, who are extremely skeptical about the economic policies of the new government. The Left has already gone to town saying that they will scrap disinvestment policies and want to reduce FII involvement in the Indian economy...and we saw the results yesterday. I believe private investors lost something like Rs. 300,000 crore in yesterday's crash and SEBI had to step in and get financial institutions to do some major buying activity to halt the slump.

Yesterday also was the first time that I thought BJP's Sushma Swaraj was being plain stupid...she made a statement saying that if Sonia Gandhi becomes PM, she is going to cut her hair, wear only white, sleep on the ground and eat only the food that is served when you are fasting. I have tremendous respect for Sushma Swaraj, and I have always thought that she would make the best PM out of all the current politicians, but I completely fail to understand the logic in this form of protest. This is just pure melodrama...totally unworthy of someone of Swaraj's stature!

And then there was the other faux pas of the day - this time from Amar Singh - who, when asked why he had not explicitly stated that he supports Sonia as PM in the letter expressing support for the Congress that he gave to the president yesterday, he just grinned and answered that he meant to put that in, but the typist must have forgotten to include it!!!!!!!!! And these are the people who are going to be running the country for us????????