Bhopal, May 10: With Madhya Pradesh slated to go for Assembly elections later this year, Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia appears to be the front-runner for the post of Chief Minister, if Congress emerges victorious.
Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh, considered close to the party high command, gave fresh thrust to Scindia's potential candidacy last week.
“I have no doubt in my mind that Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia is the front-runner for the post of the Chief Minister in Madhya Pradesh if the party wins this year's Assembly elections,” Singh said recently while talking to reporters in Gwalior.
However, Singh, the former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, said that Scindia cannot be declared as the chief ministerial candidate as the Congress did not have a tradition of doing so.
Later, Scindia had said at Ashoknagar that he was not in the race for the post.
“I am an ordinary worker of the Congress and I do not think that I am in the race for the Chief Ministership,” Scindia had said.
Some supporters of Scindia had earlier also gone to New Delhi to plead the case with the party high command for naming him as the Chief Ministerial candidate.
But they were reportedly told that the Assembly polls will be held with Kantilal Bhuria as state Congress chief and Ajay Singh as the Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly.
Scindia had a few months back said that Bhuria must become the Chief Minister, if Congress wins the Assembly elections.
The party received a shot in the arm by winning the Karnataka Assembly elections and leaders have already started saying that the Karnataka results are an indication that BJP governments in various states were on their way out.
They maintain that the “large-scale corruption under BJP governments” has made the common man fed up with the party.
However, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that the Karnataka results would have no impact on the state.
“I am unfazed by the results of the Karanataka Assembly elections and confident that it will not have any impact on Madhya Pradesh polls,” Chouhan said after the elections results were declared in Karnataka on Wednesday.
