Return of the Jat chieftain Ajit Singh

He has been a minister with VP Singh, PV Narasimha Rao, HD Devegowda and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He has also won seven Lok Sabha elections, including one on a Congress ticket. The 72-year-old Jat chieftain Ajit Singh was sworn in as union civil aviation minister today after been out of power under the UPA dispensation for a long spell.

Last week, when he announced his decision to join the UPA in Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s presence, he made up for lost time. He knew he had to get his price for the deal before the state went to polls, as there would be a lot of uncertainty in the interim if he waited any longer.

Singh brought into play his USP as the holder of the Jat card in the state assembly elections. He has five MPs and was allocated 45 seats out of the 403 in the state assembly for the showdown in 2012, but Congress managers believe that his importance extends beyond these numbers.

“In Uttar Pradesh, it is a worn out cliche that instead of casting their vote, people vote their caste. But you can only ignore it at your peril. The Jat factor thus extends beyond the Ajit Singh stronghold of Western Uttar Pradesh and so we have allocated three seats in the eastern belt for him,” said Mohan Prakash, the Congress CWC member who chairs the screen committee for candidates and was an important part of the negotiating team in the Congress-RLD backroom talks.

In the emerging political scenario, the importance of the UP elections extends beyond the territorial domains of the state and the mere formation of a state government. In a polity that is fractured along several faultlines, you have to get your arithmetic right at the constituency level.

For the RLD, the gains of the alliance have already begun to flow in. Singh is assured of power for a few more years till the next Lok Sabha elections and at the state-level he has improved his bargaining power. He has achieved these gains even as another UP boss Mulayam Singh Yadav with a larger share of MPs is struggling to regain his importance.

His job at the Centre, as the union civil aviation minister, may appear politically inconsequential at this stage, but for this US-educated engineer who has learnt the ropes of administrative and political management in the school of hard knocks, it should not be a tough task to fly the aviation sector back into the good times.