After surviving repeated demands for his removal, Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee president Subhash Yadav finally got the boot on Wednesday.In the faction-ridden Congress, it was not uncommon to find one group or the other camping in New Delhi seeking a change in the leadership. The latest salvo had come from HRD minister Arjun Singh. The high command replaced him with union minister Suresh Pachauri, whose Rajya Sabha term ends in April.Yadav, an OBC, got the job because the opposition BJP had quite a few OBC leaders. Despite being inarticulate, he managed to cling on to the post because the party could not find an alternative. Recently, he helped his son win from the Khargone Lok Sabha constituency forcing the party to delay the inevitable."I accept the high command decision", Yadav said, adding "only the high command can explain the change a few months before the Assembly elections". The appointment of Pachauri, a Brahmin, has upset the calculations of Guna MP Jyotiraditya Scindia who was plumping for the post for quite some time. While Pachauri is yet to win a single election, the young MP was projecting himself as a star campaigner. Party insiders told The Indian Express that of the 140 men who got tickets on his recommendations, only five managed to win. Pachauri himself lost a Lok Sabha election by a record margin in 1998 from Bhopal. The appointment has also to do with the Bahujan Samaj Party's attempts to replicate its social engineering formula in the state by inviting upper castes to its fold. Mayawati had addressed a rally in Bhopal on Sunday projecting BSP as a party for all castes.
