Many a slip between MHA & Bhavan, finds Patil

NEW DELHI: It wasn’t the first time that a dark horse was pipping past a front-runner for the country’s top 2 offices, that of President and the prime minister. After all, the announcement of incumbent A P J Abdul Kalam as the presidential candidate in 2002 and that of Mr Manmohan Singh as the prime minister in 2004 were as much of a surprise.

Yet, the sidelining of the Congress first family’s favourite, Union home minister Shivraj V Patil, in the final rounds of consensus building within the UPA cast a pall of gloom at his North Block office.

Just hours before being edged out by Rajasthan governor Pratibha Patil, the MHA was buzzing with excitement over its top man shifting to a snazzier address: Rashtrapati Bhavan.

The confidence over Mr Patil’s candidature for presidentship was so impeccable that his staff even forwarded his bio-data and photograph to the newspapers to facilitate a good copy announcing his name as the UPA’s choice to succeed Mr A P J Abdul Kalam.

The buzz over Mr Patil’s shift to Raisina Hill had started much before he emerged as the front-runner, thanks to Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s insistence on having him run for President.

A preparation of sorts was on in the MHA: his personal secretary for the last three years, Mr Mahesh Shukla, recently shifted out of the MHA to take up an assignment in Afghanistan. Even other members of his personal staff as well as some officers attached to him had started nurturing dreams of moving to the Presidential secretariat along with him.

Not only that, MHA beat correspondents, who have had little luck with the aloof minister in getting news, had begun to speculate if his successor would turn around their fortunes. It is therefore little surprise that the news of his being edged out of the presidential race by a surprise candidate, Ms Pratibha Patil, generated some long faces in the MHA.

Mr Patil’s room wore a deserted look, the minister was not in office when the Rajasthan governor overtook him as the front-runner for Raisina Hill.