DESPITE the snub administered by the Samajwadi Party (SP) on April 23, the Congress effort to make the numbers for Sonia Gandhi continued at a frenetic pace over the weekend. But even with muddled signals of a climbdown from the SP, party managers were left with only a faint glimmer of hope. Late on Saturday, J. Jayalalitha dimmed it further with a last-gasp blow, plumping for a third front regime led by Jyoti Basu with outside support from the Congress. Impatient with the lack of progress in the Congress manoeuvres, she firmly ruled out both a minority government or a coalition headed by it. Even before that, it was a peril-ridden sally towards power. On Saturday, SP spokesman Amar Singh was quoted by a news agency saying his party didn’t rule out conditional support to the Congress. A little over an hour later, he denied having made any such statement and was back to condemning the Congress.