BHOPAL: Senior Congress leader and former Leader of Opposition in Madhya Pradesh Ajay Singh met the state home minister Narottam Mishra on Wednesday triggering speculations in political circles. This is the third meeting of Singh with Mishra in the one month Sources said Singh and Mishra had a closed-door meeting at latter’s residence in Bhopal for close to half an hour. The leaders did not comment after the meeting, keeping the political pundits guessing in between the byelection campaigning on three assembly and one Lok Sabha seat.
However, the home minister criticized the statement given by Singh a day earlier in favor of Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan- arrested in a drugs case. Without naming Singh, Mishra said those speaking for Aryan remain silent on killings in Kashmir seeing peoples’ ID card. “Maut Par Khamoshi, Ayran Pe Rajneeti,” Mishra said.
After three electoral defeats and sitting on the sidelines for three years, Singh suddenly become the epicenter of MP politics after his three back-to-back meetings with Mishra, who was instrumental in bringing back BJP government in MP and ensuring the fall of Kamal Nath-led Congress government in March 2020.
On September 20, the political buzz went wild after Singh met Mishra at his official residence. The closeddoor meeting was claimed to be a courtesy call for some personal work.
On September 23, Singh’s birthday celebrations triggered ripples in both the ruling BJP and Congress. Two BJP stalwarts -- Narottam Mishra and BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya -- went to Singh’s office in Bhopal with bouquets to wish him. Ajay Singh is the son of Congress stalwart Arjun Singh.
The question doing the rounds is, whether there is another exodus from Congress in the offing, 19 months after Jyotiraditya Scindia walked out with two dozen loyalists, bringing down the Congress government?
A five-time MLA from Churhat in Sidhi district, Singh lost the seat to BJP’s Sharadendu Tiwari in the 2018 elections. He had also lost the Satna Lok Sabha seat to BJP’s Ganesh Singh by 9,000 votes in 2014, and was defeated in Sidhi in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
