The crafty ‘legal eagle’, Arun Jaitley, is close to Modi and has contributed hugely to the latter’s cause. “Jaitley is a great strategist and a brilliant lawyer. But he has no political base of his own,” says the insider. He deduces that even if a BJP-led coalition comes close to power, it could succeed only if it has a prime ministerial candidate acceptable to all. “That means a Manmohan Singh-type of prime minister. Jaitley feels that he himself could fit the bill,” a party insider asserts. Of course, there is no concrete proof of Jaitley’s strategy. But the insider says that if Modi fails to become prime minister, Jaitley wants that Modi should support him. The argument is that since the lawyer has no political base, Modi will not be threatened by him and therefore he can afford to bide his time as Jaitley holds the reins. But in the corridors of power in Delhi, the belief is that the relations between Modi and Jaitley are a bit frosty these days. This would imply that if push comes to shove, it cannot be taken for granted that Modi will root for Jaitley, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Gujarat and has got a fresh, six-year mandate in 2010. But the days preceding his nomination were marked by intense speculation that the Delhi lawyer would have to seek accommodation from some other state. Sushma Swaraj wants to be the first woman prime minister of the BJP. Indeed, during Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray’s lifetime, she had sought and secured his support too. But to the RSS, Swaraj is suspect because of her husband Swaraj Kaushal’s socialist background. There is no love lost between her and Modi either. Her comments at Vadodara amidst the heat of electioneering, that Modi could be a prime ministerial candidate, are attributed to convoluted political logic that only politicians can make head or tail of. In the words of a BJP insider, Sushma, by projecting him as a prime ministerial candidate, wanted to keep Modi in Gujarat till 2014 and prevent him from becoming the BJP president. The argument goes that as BJP president in Delhi, Modi would consolidate his position faster than if he were to remain in Gandhinagar as the chief minister. In the event, Modi did not press for his candidature after (Nitin) Gadkari stepped down. This was perhaps due to strategic reasons and internal opposition.