Arjun Singh: Knives out

New Delhi, Dec.12: The Congress’s Brahmin lobby has found the opportunity it was long waiting for: driving its knife into Arjun Singh, the human resource development minister.

Prominent Brahmin members Janardhan Dwivedi, Motilal Vora, Satyavrat Chaturvedi and Hans Raj Bhardwaj have regrouped and begun a campaign, asking how Arjun managed to get only two of his 30-odd candidates elected from the Baghelkhand region to which he belongs.

One of them is his son, Ajay, who he insisted should head the campaign committee.

The group, seen in a huddle in Parliament’s central hall, is said to be busy reviewing the results and trying to find out the margins by which Arjun’s nominees lost.

Like Arjun, Vora is a former Madhya Pradesh chief minister but is now part of Chhattisgarh, his home state. Chaturvedi is from Madhya Pradesh but was not too visible in the elections. Dwivedi hails from Chitrakoot on the Madhya Pradesh-Uttar Pradesh border. Bhardwaj is the lone “outsider” from Haryana but is an integral part of the Congress’s Brahmin brotherhood.

A source close to Vora, the national treasurer, said when V. Narayanaswamy, the general secretary in charge of both Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, whispered to the 80-year-old leader on the day of the results that the Congress and Vora’s son, Arun, had lost in Chhattisgarh, the reply was: “But haven’t we lost Madhya Pradesh too? What were the heavyweights there doing?”

As Sonia Gandhi has yet to convene a high-level meeting to assess the outcome of verdict 2008 — which a general secretary termed a “face-saver but not a cause to celebrate” — the first spin-off was a Brahmin-Thakur clash.

Sources said if the Brahmins were wary of dragging Digvijay Singh, Madhya Pradesh’s other well-known Thakur leader, into their dragnet, it was only because of his perceived proximity to Rahul Gandhi since being put in charge of Uttar Pradesh.

Rahul, they said, had little love lost for the HRD minister. Like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Amethi MP, too, is believed to have felt Arjun “over-played” his hand and the Congress’s on the Other Backward Classes reservation and “gratuitously” annoyed the upper classes/castes.