Bhopal: Politics is a great glue, it can bring the vanquished and the disgruntled together. Setting aside the recent acidic assembly election campaign, arch foes Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Jyotiraditya Scindia got together for a one-to-one meeting in Bhopal late on Monday night, charging the state’s political climate.Significantly, after hobnobbing behind closed doors, the two leaders appeared before the media outside Chouhan’s house but downplayed their night rendezvous as a social call. However, the fact that the tryst lasted nearly 45 minutes had the tongues wagging.
Scindia, who is seldom seen in Bhopal, was ostensibly in the city to condole the demise of family members of two of his close aides. After the visits, he abruptly took a detour towards former chief minister Chouhan’s house. Both leaders, incidentally, are at the two ends of the ideological spectrum and Chouhan often harped in recent election rallies on the blue-blooded lineage of Scinida. But they seem to have put the bitterness behind them and Scindia was rather profound when he declared: ‘‘I am not the kind of person to live with any bitterness.
Raat gayi, baat gayi (Let bygones be bygones),” reports News 18. According to the channel, Chouhan replied to media queries in the same tone, saying it was just a courtesy call. “Koi gila nahin, koi shikwa nahin, (I have no complaint or grudge),” he told reporters. Chouhan even came out of his residence and accompanied Scindia to his car.
The meeting, curiously, has come at a time chief minister Kamal Nath is away in Davos to attend the World Economic Forum.The BJP state unit latched onto the meeting and suggested that Scindia was miffed at being sidelined. What they omitted to mention was that Chouhan, too, is licking his wounds on the periphery. The party high command is also keen to move the former CM to Centre.
