The political grapevine in the Indian capital hardly ceases to be without a buzz. And the latest one is a meeting between top opposition leader Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister V P Singh here On Thursday.

This was the first meeting Singh had with the Congress chief since he left the party 15 years back following differences with Sonia's husband and former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi following controversies over some defence deals.

The ostensible and innocuous reason for Singh's calling on Sonia at her residence here was his crusade for bringing probity in the utilisation of government funds allotted to each member of parliament, according to sources close to him.

Singh had recently staged a sit-in demonstration in Lucknow, the capital of his home state of Uttar Pradesh, to further his mission. He has written letters to heads of various political parties to direct their lawmakers to submit a statement of expenditures of the funds they got from government for their local area development.

But the deeper political signifi-

cance of the Sonia-Singh meeting was not lost on observers.

First, it came at a time when assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, politically a key state, are round the corner and Congress is trying to bring back its long-lost dominance there in the face of stiff competition from BJP, Samajwadi Party led by Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party headed by Kanshi Ram.

Secondly, analysts feel V P Singh's meeting with Sonia might help her to further wear thin her "foreigner" image, an issue to press for which at least three senior leaders of Congress Sharad Pawar, P A Sangma and Tariq Anwar had quit and formed a separate party three years ago.

It could, the analysts feel, could be a sign of Sonia's growing acceptance to other opposition parties, especially after warming up of relations between Congress and Samajwadi Party in recent months.

Interestingly, V P Singh, all through his years of anti-Congressism, had not said anything against Sonia since she assumed Congress Presidentship in 1997.

After quitting Congress, V P Singh had become a bete-noire of

Rajiv Gandhi and the bitterness of the circumstances in which Singh had left the party lingered for more than a decade. Can Singh and Congress make a new beginning?

Even if the possibility of Singh's return to Congress is ruled out for the present, it certainly was a sort of "home-coming" for Akbar Ahmed, a known politician from Uttar Pradesh whose rise to prominence owed more to his proximity to Rajiv's brother Sanjay Gandhi and his wife Maneka, now a minister in Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's government.

Given the extremely strained ties between Sonia and Maneka, the two daughters-in-law of Indira Gandhi, the return of Akbar Ahmed, popularly known as "Dumpy," to Congress is significant.

At the Congress party headquarters here Thursday announcing Ahmed's rejoining the party, Congress General Secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad made it a point to recall that "Dumpy" was a close associate of Sanjay Gandhi. After quitting Congress, Akbar Ahmed was for a long time with Bahujan Samaj Party.