As Sonia Gandhi looks on, Manmohan Singh and LK Advani greet each other at Rashtrapati Bhavan. (Rajesh Kumar)

New Delhi, May 22: S.M. Krishna’s name cropped up as a ministerial probable over the last two days. M. Veerappa Moily’s never did. C.P. Joshi was mentioned casually in conversations among Rajasthan Congress workers at the party headquarters.

If they made it as the new faces in Manmohan Singh’s A-list, they have to thank the low or the zero media spotlight on them. To the Congress, excessive media attention and hints of lobbying are cardinal sins.

Krishna was lucky this time. In the UPA’s first tenure, his name inevitably figured actively before a shuffle: when he was Maharashtra governor and later when he returned to Karnataka to lead the party in the 2008 Assembly elections.

Nobody figured why someone who presided over a defeat as chief minister in 2004 would be rewarded with a berth in Delhi. But Krishna was not a run-of-the-mill Congress neta. He was among its first state leaders to dump socialism for reforms in a big way.

His “fabled” boost to infrastructure in a state that was never known for its roads and power supply attracted foreign investment. With Andhra’s N. Chandrababu Naidu, he took advantage of India’s IT potential. Infosys and Wipro were products of Krishna’s outlook and Bangalore earned its place as India’s “Silicon Valley” during his term between 1999 and 2004.

But like Naidu, Krishna’s urban focus also proved his undoing during a term that saw four years of consecutive drought. In 2004, Krishna shifted from his constituency of Maddur fearing a backlash from farmers, and got elected from the central Bangalore seat of Chamarajpet.

Krishna never stomached the idea of a coalition with arch enemy H.D. Deve Gowda , also a Vokkaliga like him.

When he returned to Karnataka after his gubernatorial assignment, there was the threat that his political career would be finished. But Krishna managed to secure a place in the Rajya Sabha against the wishes of state leaders.

An avid tennis player and always impeccably dressed, Krishna also likes to design men’s clothes according to his profile on the Parliament website. His son-in-law, V.G. Siddhartha, owns the coffee chain Café Coffee Day.

Krishna, who is said to have a comfort level with the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi, is now in the race for the external affairs ministry.

“Losers win, winners lose,” a general secretary remarked caustically.

Moily never saw himself as a loser. As the Congress’s media department head, he tried to clear the confusion over who his party would align with if it fell short of numbers and entangled himself in knots. He was asked to confine himself to Chikbelapur, from where he contested.

Moily apparently told his confidants his detractors got their comeuppance today. He has the Prime Minister’s confidence because of his unqualified support for the nuclear deal.

His rise in the Congress began in January 2008 when he hosted a lunch for the media to which his neighbour, Rahul Gandhi, came. Moily’s house in Tughlaq Lane became the power centre, at least for a few weeks. He climbed the popularity charts, pipping others like Janardhan Dwivedi and Digvijay Singh at the post.

As the chairman of the administrative reforms commission, he brought out 15 reports on various aspects of governance and hoped he would get a ministry to implement some of his recommendations.

A workhorse, Moily spends the morning writing his interpretations of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in verse in Kannada. He said he did not use the computer because it did not inspire him enough.

Joshi introduced the science of micro-managing elections in the Rajasthan Congress. In 2008, he prepared dossiers on each Assembly constituency, detailing the caste, gender profiles etc. Based on them, the Congress crafted its social coalition strategies and devised ways of welding contradictory caste interests. It worked up to a point in the December elections but sources said it bore fruits in the Lok Sabha polls in which the Congress picked up 21 of the 26 seats in Rajasthan.