ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

By Asiantribune - New Delhi | The Mumbai mayhem by Pakistan based Lashkar-e-Taiba has claimed the scalp of India's dapper home minister Shivraj Pail (74). As public clamor mounted for heads to roll, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accepted Patil's resignation and shifted finance minister P Chidambaram to Home. Both Finance and Home Ministries are housed in the same building, an imposing red brick structure – North Block, facing the Prime Minister's Office, the South Block which is also home to the defence ministry, on the Raisina Hill, close to Parliament House.

Chidambaram, a lawyer by training, had handled the Internal Security Ministry under Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. His finance portfolio will be taken over by the Prime Minister.

Shivraj Patil resigned Sunday, taking moral responsibility for the failure to prevent terror attacks such as the one in Mumbai. He came under fire at the Congress party's highest decision making body, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting. The refrain of several leaders, including Union Ministers P Chidambaram, Kamal Nath, Kapil Sibal and H R Bhardwaj at the meeting was that a strong action is needed in the wake of the Mumbai terror strikes and accountability has to be ensured at the higher as well as lower levels.

Cornered from all sides, Patil told the CWC, "I take the responsibility (for the internal security) and whatever the CWC decides, I am ready to do".

Sunday morning, he met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and submitted his resignation.

Patil said the Congress party and the government should not suffer because of the terror attacks and that is why he had taken this decision.

A known loyalist of Sonia Gandhi, Shiv Raj Patil has been on the firing line for a long while with critics charging him with ineptitude. Patil was criticized for his statements whenever terrorist strikes took place and he has been publicly lampooned for his penchant to change his dress 'to suit the occasion' during the day. And his sartorial fetish on the day serial bomb blasts hit Delhi in September this year brought him under TV scrutiny.

Patil was inducted into the Union Cabinet despite his defeat from Latur in Maharashtra in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls and has been a target of the opposition as also the detractors within the party over his handling of the internal security situation in the country.

He was first elected to the Latur Municipality as its President in 1967. He became a Member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly in 1972 and presided over the House as its Speaker from 1978 to 1979.
Patil was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time in 1980 and was appointed Union Minister of State for Defence in the Indira Gandhi government the same year.

During his political career, he held a number of ministries including those of Commerce, Science and Technology, Atomic Energy and Tourism and Civil Aviation.