CHANDIGARH: In the continuing efforts to resolve their irritants and make the Congress in Punjab a well-oiled machine to contest the forthcoming Assembly elections, Chief Minister Harcharan Singh Brar and Pradesh Congress Committee president Virendra Kataria, for the first time, met here last week. They had never met alone earlier ever since Kataria was nominated as PPCC chief by the party high command just before the Lok Sabha elections.
The two leaders discussed the party affairs for about 45 minutes, the meeting was held in a congenial atmosphere. Both leaders decided to extend full cooperation to each other and resolve all the irritants. To begin with, the two leaders would together go to the masses during the mass contact campaign to be launched by the party at the state level in the near future. Brar, on his part, would open a dialogue with the dissidents in the party, mainly some former ministers and MLAs considered being the Beant Singh loyalists.
Kataria said after the meeting, “I am an optimist and hope for the best.” Kataria also took up with the Chief Minister the matter of framing the son of former minister Surinder Kapoor in a criminal case by the Bathinda police last week. The case has been agitating the dissidents. According to the sources, Brar and Kataria also went into the role played by some leaders to widen the chasm between them for their own vested interests. Katana bad earlier described Braras the “dissident Chief Minister”. The council of ministers, at its first meeting after the Lok Sabha elections, had passed a unanimous resolution demanding the removal of Kataria as the PPCC president. Both the leaders had been blaming each other for the party debacle in the Lok Sabha elections. The two leaders were summoned to Delhi by the party high command last week to resolve their differences. They had also met AICC president P.V. Narasimha Rao. The meeting was part of that initiative.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 12, 1996
