While he had good relationship with national leaders of BJP like Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his links with the local BJP leaders was feeble. Some of them like Pramod Mahajan and Prakash Jawadekar used to attend Joshi’s speeches but there was never any political alliance with them. Many years later Joshi was appointed as the head of the Agriculture Task Force by Vajpayee when the latter became the Prime Minister and Joshi even became a Rajya Sabha member; but that happened much later. The next move SS made was to support Prakash Ambedkar of Republican Party in Nanded Lok Sabha by-election in March 1987. That seat was earlier won by Shankarrao Chavan of Congress (I) but he had resigned after becoming the Chief Minister. SS campaigned hard in support of Ambedkar, Joshi himself spoke in several meetings, but ultimately Ashok Chavan of Congress (I), son of Shankarrao Chavan, won with a wide margin. After some years Joshi met Vishwanath Pratap Singh who was a trusted friend of Rajiv Gandhi. He came from a royal family and was earlier Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. A confidante of Indira Gandhi, it was she who brought him to Delhi as the Union Commerce Minister. Later he held the posts of Finance Minister and Defence Minister in Rajiv cabinet. However, he resigned because of the alleged corruption in the purchase of Bofors guns. In the beginning Singh, along with his two former Congress colleagues Arun Nehru and Arif Mohamad Khan, launched a new party called Jan Morcha; but very next year on 11 October 1988, the birth anniversary of Jayaprakash Narayan, he merged that party with three other parties, Janata Party, Lok Dal and Congress (S), to form Janata Dal, which later became known as National Front. Both, Joshi and Singh took to each other after their very first On Political Front
Q
253
