Arjun elbows his way to a vantage point

Sitting at the desk he was at until exactly a decade ago, Minister for Human Resources Development Arjun Singh, 74, looks decidedly younger than he has over most of that period. He nevertheless looks glum.

No wonder. He had not imagined when he gave up his cabinet berth then that he would return to the same job after all this time and struggle – with little hope of promotion to the job he has eyed since at least the time Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, if not since he was vice-president of the party in the early 1980s.

Arjun Singh probably thought he had the prime minister's post in the bag when he proposed in the Congress Working Committee after Rajiv's assassination that Sonia Gandhi take over the party and the government. When Narasimha Rao got the job instead, Singh bided his time until he split the party in '94, arguing that the government had not probed Rajiv's assassination with adequate assiduity.

Now that he finds himself back to the politically antiseptic portfolio that Rao had given him, it appears that his ambition for the top job is not dead. Far from it.

Giving the lie to those who predicted that he would try to earn kudos by vigorously undoing the RSS agenda that his predecessor, Murli Manohar Joshi, implemented, Singh has raked up his old concern. Probe the Rajiv assassination farther, he advised Prime Minister Manmohan Singh before the government had even settled in.

It is a clever bit of positioning, for Singh has thus set himself up as the handle Sonia Gandhi can use whenever – some would say, if ever – she wants to get rid of Manmohan Singh. Of course, Arjun Singh would hope to be duly rewarded at least this time.

Plus, the party could adopt his tune if it wanted to sever links with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the Marumalarchi DMK, two of its coalition partners from Tamil Nadu. Rajiv was assassinated in that state and leading members of both those parties have been implicated by conspiracy theorists.

This early positioning has taken Arjun Singh to the top of the list of ministers who could destabilise the incumbent regime.

Agreeing that Manmohan Singh was no vote-catcher, he told Gulf News that, in future elections, "the main person who will attract popular support will be Mrs Gandhi."

He couched his advice for extending the investigation in unexceptionable terms but did make it clear that the ideological slant of his ministry was not his priority.

"I am not here to cancel everything out that has been done previously," he told Gulf News, regarding the speculation that his primary task would be to push back Joshi's Hindutva agenda.

To be sure, he has called a meeting of directors and chairmen of the Indian Institutes of Management on May 31 but he made it clear that he would first find out the logic for his predecessor's decision to slash fees. That decision was alright, he added, unless it had been "an ad hoc thing" or impinged on the autonomy of the institutions.

Asked about the Congress party's prospects in Uttar Pradesh, Singh said no more than that "lots of colleagues" were engaged in devising plans and that Sonia had "lots of advisors" on the subject.

He did not say but no doubt feels that he could provide more useful inputs. As for his home state, Madhya Pradesh, Arjun Singh was categorical. "We have an uphill battle" there, he said about his party.