Prime Minister Narendra Modi made time in his busy schedule on Wednesday to meet with a Congress delegation which urged him to act in the public employees recruitment scam involving Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan by ordering a Central Bureau of Investigation enquiry into this case.
The Congress leaders said they presented the prime minister “solid evidence” against Chouhan in connection with the irregularities in the recruitments in the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examinations Board, also known as Vyapam, which included a CD and excel-sheet document mentioning “CM” against the names of as many as 48 of the 131 illegal appointees.
The delegation comprised former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh, party MPs from the state Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia and former Union minister Kapil Sibal.
“We met the Prime Minister over the Vyapam issue, which is perhaps the biggest scam in India," Sibal told journalists after the meeting. "This time we have furnished solid evidence before the prime minister. Before the Lok Sabha polls, the prime minister used to claim that neither he will engage in corruption nor will allow anybody to do it. Now we expect the prime minister to take the matter into his own hands and ensure action to live by his words. We hope that the PM will stick to what he had said.”
An unusual meeting
Modi’s appointment with a delegation of MPs would normally be dismissed as a routine matter but this meeting sparked off its fair share of speculation.
The very fact that Modi agreed to meet a delegation of opposition leaders, who are seeking the ouster of a chief minister belonging to his party, set tongues wagging in political circles. The Congress party’s Madhya Pradesh unit has mounted a sustained campaign against Chouhan and has been demanding his resignation for his alleged involvement in the recruitment scam.
Modi’s meeting with Congress MPs is being seen as a signal that he is not averse to the campaign against Chouhan. It is no coincidence that Chouhan’s bête noire, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kailash Vijayvargiya who sees himself as CM-in-waiting, is close to party president Amit Shah.
The speculation which followed the Wednesday meeting has its basis in the troubled relationship between Modi and Chouhan.
Not only is Chouhan known for his proximity to veteran BJP leader LK Advani and External Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, he was also tipped by them as a possible Prime Ministerial candidate before Modi was declared as the chosen one. Opposed to Modi’s projection as the party’s future PM, Advani had made a vain attempt to push his protégé as a possible candidate for the top job on the ground that he had proved to be an efficient administrator who had also won his state three times in a row.
Troubled relationship
Chouhan was considered to be out of favour and was not given a place in the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, the party’s highest decision-making body while Modi was inducted into the body before the last general election. Chouhan’s loyalty was on test and it was only when he swept the Madhya Pradesh Lok Sabha polls and publicly accepted Modi as his leader that he was inducted into the Parliamentary Board. Ironically, his chief mentor Advani was dropped from it and made a member of the newly-constituted body for party seniors, the Marg Darshak Mandal.
Nevertheless, Chouhan’s relations with Modi have, at best, been tenuous. The recruitment scam has only served to undermine the Madhya Pradesh chief minister’s position in the party. It has also strengthened Modi whose leadership came under a cloud after the BJP’s humiliating defeat in the Delhi assembly polls. There were murmurs in the BJP after this result that the party’s regional satraps would now become more assertive. On the contrary, Chouhan finds himself on the backfoot while Modi continues to hold all the aces.
Chouhan may be on shaky ground at present but he is also known to be a survivor. He has been similarly hit by corruption scandals in the past but he always managed to come out of them. Not only does he have a Teflon image, Chouhan is personally popular with the people and he also enjoys the confidence of Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, who was recently re-elected as the general secretary of the BJP’s ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
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The Congress leaders said they presented the prime minister “solid evidence” against Chouhan in connection with the irregularities in the recruitments in the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examinations Board, also known as Vyapam, which included a CD and excel-sheet document mentioning “CM” against the names of as many as 48 of the 131 illegal appointees.
The delegation comprised former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh, party MPs from the state Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia and former Union minister Kapil Sibal.
“We met the Prime Minister over the Vyapam issue, which is perhaps the biggest scam in India," Sibal told journalists after the meeting. "This time we have furnished solid evidence before the prime minister. Before the Lok Sabha polls, the prime minister used to claim that neither he will engage in corruption nor will allow anybody to do it. Now we expect the prime minister to take the matter into his own hands and ensure action to live by his words. We hope that the PM will stick to what he had said.”
An unusual meeting
Modi’s appointment with a delegation of MPs would normally be dismissed as a routine matter but this meeting sparked off its fair share of speculation.
The very fact that Modi agreed to meet a delegation of opposition leaders, who are seeking the ouster of a chief minister belonging to his party, set tongues wagging in political circles. The Congress party’s Madhya Pradesh unit has mounted a sustained campaign against Chouhan and has been demanding his resignation for his alleged involvement in the recruitment scam.
Modi’s meeting with Congress MPs is being seen as a signal that he is not averse to the campaign against Chouhan. It is no coincidence that Chouhan’s bête noire, senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kailash Vijayvargiya who sees himself as CM-in-waiting, is close to party president Amit Shah.
The speculation which followed the Wednesday meeting has its basis in the troubled relationship between Modi and Chouhan.
Not only is Chouhan known for his proximity to veteran BJP leader LK Advani and External Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, he was also tipped by them as a possible Prime Ministerial candidate before Modi was declared as the chosen one. Opposed to Modi’s projection as the party’s future PM, Advani had made a vain attempt to push his protégé as a possible candidate for the top job on the ground that he had proved to be an efficient administrator who had also won his state three times in a row.
Troubled relationship
Chouhan was considered to be out of favour and was not given a place in the BJP’s Parliamentary Board, the party’s highest decision-making body while Modi was inducted into the body before the last general election. Chouhan’s loyalty was on test and it was only when he swept the Madhya Pradesh Lok Sabha polls and publicly accepted Modi as his leader that he was inducted into the Parliamentary Board. Ironically, his chief mentor Advani was dropped from it and made a member of the newly-constituted body for party seniors, the Marg Darshak Mandal.
Nevertheless, Chouhan’s relations with Modi have, at best, been tenuous. The recruitment scam has only served to undermine the Madhya Pradesh chief minister’s position in the party. It has also strengthened Modi whose leadership came under a cloud after the BJP’s humiliating defeat in the Delhi assembly polls. There were murmurs in the BJP after this result that the party’s regional satraps would now become more assertive. On the contrary, Chouhan finds himself on the backfoot while Modi continues to hold all the aces.
Chouhan may be on shaky ground at present but he is also known to be a survivor. He has been similarly hit by corruption scandals in the past but he always managed to come out of them. Not only does he have a Teflon image, Chouhan is personally popular with the people and he also enjoys the confidence of Suresh Bhaiyyaji Joshi, who was recently re-elected as the general secretary of the BJP’s ideological mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
