Old habits die hard. And if you are a politician, they seldom go away even with time and adverse conditions. And so the Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Amar Singh is no exception. Recouping from a kidney transplant in Singapore, he has not been able to keep his eyes off whats happening back home in India.

And with arch rival BJP in unprecedented turmoil, Amar Singh is on a routine fishing expedition - trying to bait the expelled leader Jaswant Singh into joining the SP.

According to sources and reports, both the Singh’s have already spoken twice on the telephone on the issue and the matter “would be taken to a logical conclusion” once Singh returns to New Delhi in the first week of September, after a two month long stay in a Singapore hospital.

Other than the Thakur tag what seems to be working just fine for the SP is the non-RSS tag on Jaswant that it would like to flaunt before rolling out the red carpet to Jaswant Singh. Other than this Jaswant could come in handy to the SP which is trying desperately to find a foothold in the desert state of Rajasthan.

The party had two years back undertaken a similar experiment when the Congress showed its senior leader Natwar Singh the door. Natwar and his son Jagat Singh were welcomed in the party fold. It however did not last very long and Natwar later joined the BSP and found a new leader in UP chief minister Mayawati.

The Amar Singh invite suits the expelled leader as well as he has “very few friends in other parties” who would like to “sleep with the enemy” even if he happens to be a one time foe! Singh is learnt to be closely monitoring the situation and apart from Jaswant is also learnt to be eyeing leaders to the like of former finance minister Yashwant Sinha who has openly aired his grouse against the party leadership.

Sinha too like Jaswant Singh has been a non-RSS member of the BJP and is learnt to be stiffled ever since the Atal Behari Vajpayee era came to a end following the former prime ministers bowing out of active politics on health grounds. Both Amar Singh and his party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav seem to be impressing upon the “unsettled leaders” of the BJP that sooner than later, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is likely to tighten its stranglehold on the BJP and the atmosphere might turn too suffocating for the liberal class in the BJP.

Haunted by the spectre of RSS in the drivers seat, there would be many leaders in the BJP, independent political observers agree, who could think of migrating from the party, that many feel, is on path of an irreversible course of harakiri!