Loyalist, strategist of Gandhi family

Mar 05, 2011 |

Age Correspondent

New Delhi

Considered a Gandhi family loyalist and a shrewd strategist, Arjun Singh was chief minister of MP between 1980 and 1985 and was made governor of Punjab just a day after he took oath as CM for the second time in the state. He became governor at the height of militancy and helped a young Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reach an accord with Akali Dal leader Sant Harchand Singh Longowal that came to be known as the Rajiv-Longowal peace accord.
He also held prestigious portfolios at the Centre — commerce and communications minister in the Eighties and HRD Minister in the Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh governments.
A leader who swore by secular ideals, he turned against Rao in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. Thou-gh he did not resign from the government immediately, he later parted ways with Rao in 1994 and formed a rebel Congress under the leadership of N.D. Tiwari.

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DMK may go alone as Cong deal elusive
M. Gunasekaran
Chennai

March 4: Ending the long suspense, DMDK leader Vijayakanth on Friday met AIADMK chief J. Jayalalithaa at her Poes Garden bungalow and signed a poll pact for 41 Assembly election seats.
On the other hand, in the rival DMK camp, distinct signs are emerging that the alliance with the Congress is getting increasingly strained even after the former yielded to the Congress demand for 60 seats.
“We are preparing to go it alone. They had asked for 60 seats and we agreed. Then they wanted to identify their seats and we said we are willing to talk. Now they are scaling up their demand. We are tired,” a senior DMK MP told this newspaper on condition of anonymity. Earlier, it was said that AICC general secretary Ghulam Nabi Azad will be flying in from Delhi on Saturday to finalise the seat-sharing deal with the DMK. Mr Vijayakanth arrived at Poes Garden at 9.30 pm, along with DMDK presidium chairman Panrutti S. Ramachandran and youth wing secretary L. K. Sudheesh, who is his brother-in-law. The actor-politician was at Ms Jayalalithaa’s residence for barely 15 minutes before he drove away without speaking to mediapersons waiting outside the bungalow.
With the DMDK signing up with the AIADMK, the pressure is greater on the DMK to rope in the Congress.

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