Row after row, how Digvijaya has rocked Cong’s boat in the past

His rise in the Congress began in 1985 after Rajiv Gandhi, then the prime minister and Congress president, picked a 38-year-old Singh to head the Madhya Pradesh Congress.

A member of the erstwhile royal family of Raghogarh in Madhya Pradesh’s Guna district, the 78-year-old is a two-time Rajya Sabha member, whose current term will end in 2026. He has also served as a two-term chief minister for the Congress in Madhya Pradesh.

His second innings in politics and his emergence as a national leader for the Congress after 2005 saw him court several controversies that haunt him to this day.

In January 2023, Singh triggered a row when he raised doubts over the 2016 surgical strikes across LoC; he also raised questions about the 2019 terror attack in Pulwama, accusing the government of being “liars” who were yet to present a report in Parliament on “why the 40 CRPF personnel had got martyred’’.

Singh’s remarks saw a backlash from the BJP, which said the Congress was “blinded by hate” for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and had insulted the country’s Armed Forces. The Congress distanced itself from Singh’s comments, with senior leader Jairam Ramesh saying he “does not reflect the position of the party”.

Tirade against UPA

Singh’s remarks when the Congress-led UPA government was in power also gave the party some headaches back in the day.

His claim that the 2008 Batla House encounter was fake and the demand for a judicial probe had put the Manmohan Singh government in a spot.

His comment that he had spoken to Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare on November 26, 2008, hours before the city faced a terrorist attack, had also sparked a row. Karkare was killed in the attack. Digvijaya claimed that the ATS chief had told him that he had been receiving threat calls from Hindu extremists. Karkare at the time was heading the investigation into the 2008 Malegaon blasts for which three members of a Hindutva group had been arrested.

Singh’s visit to Azamgarh in 2010 — according to him to find out “the reasons behind Azamgarh being named in terror attack cases” — also pushed the party to a corner and he was seen as overdoing the “Muslim line”, often by making polarising statements.

The former Madhya Pradesh CM took on the then Union Home Minister, P Chidambaram, in 2010 on the government’s anti-Naxal policy, even calling him “intellectually arrogant” in a newspaper article.