The Tiwari Congress has called a meeting of its working committee on December 11. The agenda is a resolution on the complete and unconditional merger of the party, which was created at a convention in the capital in May, 1995, with the parent body.
One of Kesaris aides said the merger would probably take place a few days after that. Kesari obviously wants to make Tiwari and Arjun Singh shuffle their feet at the door a while longer. One of his associates in the party said that he fears that either of them could make a bid for his job if they are given too high a profile.
This associate says Kesari has reconciled himself to having Arjun Singh back, perhaps because Singh is not an MP, having lost the election for the Satna Lok Sabha, but is deeply uneasy about having Tiwari back.
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Kesari is averse to giving either of them berths in the Congress Working Committee, his aide added. There are three vacancies there and Kesari had wanted to appoint three chief ministers - JB Patnaik, Digvijay Singh and SC Jamir - to block any lobbying by Singh and Tiwari. Kesari had also worked on names for setting up a Congress Parliamentary Board, which has not been appointed since 1991. He apparently wanted the board in place before Singh and Tiwari were reinducted.
There is speculation in the party that Sonia Gandhi has not approved these appointments. Kesari has been in regular touch with her and the Rao camp has been gleefully pointing to this and contrasting it with the way Rao deftly used the Bofors card to keep her at bay for five years.
Preparations for the reinduction were visible in statements from Madhya Pradesh. Chief Minister Digvijay Singh was reported by an agency to say that Arjun Singhs expulsion from the Congress and the hawala scandal, because of which senior party leaders could not contest the Lok Sabha elections, were the major challenges faced by him in the last three years.
The Chief Minister will have to do some explaining to Arjun Singh. mentor from splitting the state unit by arguing that the Shukla brothers had enough supporters to bring down the government.
If he was allowed to remain as Chief Minister, he could wean over almost all the MLAs to Arjun Singhs side. Instead, he weaned over most of his mentors loyalists over the next few months and turned loyal to Rao.
Digvijay told an agency interviewer that, though the Congress had received a drubbing in Madhya Pradesh during this years lok sabha elections, it was resurrected during the October by-elections, when it won in five out of 10 Assembly constituencies. He attributed the setback to resistance to the nascent panchayati raj institutions, thus suggesting that the split did not make much of a dent in the Congresss vote base.