One step sideways

The two-day political churning in the capital's corridors of power inevitably had its share of drama, and no one contributed to it more than Chowdhury Birender Singh, the senior Jat leader from Haryana. In the reshuffle of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), the party's state-level Assembly, on Sunday evening, the member in charge of Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand was divested of his organisational posts like fellow Congressman Oscar Fernandes. So where was he going? The textile ministry, some newspapers speculated, but no one could confirm this. Singh's mobile phones were switched off and his residential staff said "he would not be available for the whole of today". Most journalists interpreted this as Singh's leg-up to the Cabinet. But just before the Cabinet reshuffle, the AICC let it be officially known that Singh had been inducted as a member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party's executive committee. It appears that Singh had got wind of the fact that he was to be left high and dry, which is why he turned incommunicado. All the sulking finally paid off, however, since he managed to extract a nominal promotion in a CWC berth.