Chandigarh, April 25: Former union home minister Shivraj Patil, who had to pay the price for his inability to rise to the country’s biggest terrorist challenge on 26/11 by first being eased out of the cabinet and then shunted out of Delhi as governor of Punjab, is now said to be lying low in the sylvan surroundings of the Chandigarh Raj Bhavan.
The buzz in the capital’s circles is that Patil has completely shut himself off from people and spends most of his time inside the sprawling governor’s estate that is walking distance of the Sukhna Lake.
He ventures out only for a few functions once in a while – making sure that he dresses immaculately for each of them. His sartorial consciousness, witnessed even during the Mumbai attack when he was found changing his dress every time he came on television, had come in then for trenchant criticism.
The buzz is Patil, a Sonia Gandhi loyalist, has been promised the vice president’s job the next time around and is hence marking his time in his gubernatorial assignment that includes being administrator of the union territory of Chandigarh.
However, Patil now has to deal with the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which he once headed, as the ministry is the controlling ministry for Chandigarh.
–IANS