AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh may have scored a point or two with his diatribe against Baba Ramdev but the party high command is not with him as is being construed.
The party has to date kept away from the twin-troubles facing it - Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev. The party view: No need for it to be pro-active on issues raised by the duo. Let the government handle them. So, it did not interfere when the government deputed five union ministers to draft the Lok Pal Bill, nor when it constituted a 4-member Group of Ministers to talk to Ramdev.
Sources told DNA that the only question Sonia asked in the party’s core committee meeting was: Why did Pranab Mukherjee go to the airport to talk to Ramdev? That left everybody speechless. The cat was out of the bag. She was unhappy. Divijay Singh took advantage. He was aided by Union Home minister P Chidamabaram. The rest of the damage was done by Ramdev himself who turned out to be a bad negotiator.
Sources say that Digvijay Singh-Ramdev tussle had a lot more to do with Madhya Pradesh politics, that there were Congress leaders opposed to Digvijay who sided with Ramdev. These leaders point out that Swami Ramdev was neither a RSS agent and nor with the BJP. On the contrary, he was being propped up by a strong section of the Congress. The assessment was that Baba Ramdev could cause enough damage to the BJP’s vote bank.
Therefore, there is a re-think on the handling of the Ramdev issue and Digvijay Singh’s may not be the last word on Ramdev. Even otherwise, the government had been very liberal to Ramdev giving him one or the other concession and patronising him all through.
He was about to meet Rahul Gandhi when all hell broke at the Ramlila ground, and things slipped out of hand.
