BHOPAL, March 7: Chief Minister Digvijay Singh should have known what his party was in for at the hustings after former chief minister Govind Narayan Singh had suggested last year that the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) be dissolved and another body comprising ``true'' Congressmen be set up. Perhaps he should have listened hard to Singh's statement that Kesri had achieved his aim of being elected party president and did not need the PCC. For it is now true that the first chief minister in the country to lose two general elections in a single term in office does not occasion much confidence. V.C. Shukla and Madhavrao Scindia have already stated that the state government (read Digvijay) cannot escape responsibility for the poor show. Former chief minister Shyama Charan Shukla has also added his word in public to these statements.They can't be faulted for their criticism: the Congress could get only 10 seats while the BJP bagged 30, two more than it had in the dissolved House; 28 ministers could not garnerleads for party Lok Sabha candidates in their home Vidhan Sabha constituencies while four ministers lost the election outright.The reason partymen have agreed upon is weak organisation. At a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday there was near unanimity on the faulty implementation of Panchayati Raj as the major cause for the setback. If this is so, then Arjun Singh and Madhavrao Scindia too cannot escape blame as they had packed the PCC with their favourites or relatives. However, both paid the price. Scindia barely managed to win as resident of Palace Gwalior while heavyweight Arjun lost by heavy margins in all the eight Assembly segments of the Hoshangabad seat.The one lesson which each party has learnt is that the electorate does not want an ``outsider'' to represent them anymore. Every leader who contested outside his home district lost, be it Arjun, Netam, Patwa or Joshi.For the BJP, the immediate impact has been the replacement of the old guard with younger persons. Even the two men who had groomed theparty from its infancy in the '50s, former chief ministers Sunderlal Patwa and Kailash Joshi, themselves lost. They will now make way for younger leaders.BJP worries, however, centre around the tribals. Not only did their state president Nand Kumar Sai loose from Raigarh their pre-election import, Dilip Singh Bhuria, got a drubbing in Jhabua.
