Done with her theatrics in Delhi and her retreat to Kedarnath, Uma Bharti will have to return to face challenges that no one could have anticipated five months ago when she led her party to a landslide victory in the Assembly polls. While within the party, senior leaders such as Kailash Joshi are expressing their resentment at her style of functioning, indications have already started arriving of a Central government not too keen on helping out a financially beleaguered state. The first indications became available when a senior bureaucrat rang up his counterpart in the coal ministry to check on over Rs 200 crore that was to have been released as MP’s share of the royalties from the coal produced in the state. After Uma Bharti took over, the money was readied on the instructions of her confidante Prahlad Patel, then Union Minister for Coal. The money, however, could not be released because the code of conduct was in place. Now the state government has been politely informed that the file has not yet been properly examined and the procedure will take some more time.A senior bureaucrat adds, ‘‘This is no surprise. By opening a front against Sonia Gandhi, she has called this upon the state. There is no need for anyone to issue instructions, each bureaucrat at the Centre, processing requests from Madhya Pradesh, now understands that the wisest course would be to set the file aside for ‘further consideration’. For MP, this is a double blow. According to one estimate, over the last two years of the Digvijay tenure, the state was deprived of nearly Rs 1,000 crore, due to it from the Centre by way of various funds.” At the same time, the problems with her autocratic style of functioning are coming to a head. The recent list of appointment to various state corporations, which include her brother Swami Lodhi and TV’s Krishna Nitish Bhardwaj, has been the last straw. Both state BJP chief Kailash Joshi and senior RSS man Kaptan Singh Solanki, the BJP organising general secretary, have taken strong exception to the list, made up of almost entirely of Uma loyalists. Joshi has been in Delhi over the past few days where he has met Venkaiah Naidu and A.B. Vajpayee to convey his dismay.Uma had already earned his ire by literally coercing him into contesting the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat, hoping that this would pave the way for a candidate of her own choosing to run the state unit. But the move boomeranged with the Congress victory.The bureaucracy, already reeling under a spate of transfers, was in for another shock when a new list of 35 transfers was announced. This has ensured that no one in bureaucracy has any idea of what she expects of them. Meanwhile, Uma Bharti today said the Congress chief had not turned down prime ministership but had ‘‘failed to muster courage to hold the post due to tremendous public pressure over her foreign origin. She was scared’’, Bharti told BJP workers on her return. Bharti, whose resignation was rejected by BJP President Venkaiah Naidu following Sonia’s refusal to accept premiership, said the PM’s post was adorned by leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekhar and Atal Behari Vajpayee, ‘‘therefore, to say that somebody has rejected the top post is an insult to the nation”.
