Agencies

Former union minister Jyotiraditya Scindia on Tuesday triggered a possible collapse of the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh government by resigning from the party after his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and getting more than 20 of his loyalists to quit their assembly membership .Scindia started from his residence in Delhi after 10 am and went to meet Home Minister Amit Shah, after which both of them drove down together to the 7, Lok Kalyan Marg residence of the prime minister.Shortly after the meeting , Scindia tweeted his letter of resignation from the Congress in which he said it was time for him to move on after working with the Congress for 18 years."To reflect and realise the aspirations of my people and my workers I believe it is best that I now look ahead at a fresh start," he said said in his letter to Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi Scindia said his resignation was " a path that has been drawing itself out over the last year", in a clear reference to his fights with the party leadership in the state.The Congress hit back with a symbolic move by expelling its party general secretary and scion of the erstwhile Gwalior royal family on charges of "anti-party activities".Shortly afterward 19 Congress MLAs, including six state ministers, sent in their resignation letters to the governor and tweeted a picture of all of them together at a resort in Bengaluru. Three other MLAs sent handed over their resignations directly to NP Prajapati.A delegation of BJP leaders met the Speaker and forwarded the resignations urging him to accept them immediately to which Prajapati replied he would "take action according to established procedure".Scindia is set to join the BJP sometime this week, party sources told ET. Today is the birth anniversary of his father, the late Madhavrao Scindia, who was a union minister in the Congress governments led by Rajiv Gandhi and PV Narasimha Rao.The BJP has called for a meeting of its legislature party at 6 pm, where former chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan is likely to be elected leader. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, the party vice president in charge of Madhya Pradesh rushed to Bhopal and held meetings with Chouhan and BJP MLAs.Gopal Bhargava, the present leader of opposition in the assembly, told reporters there was nothing left now in the Kamal Nath government and that the BJP was willing to stake claim "if people wanted".Matters reached a flashpoint on Tuesday when the Congress MLAs close to Scindia left for Bengaluru in a chartered flight and were put up at a resort in BJP-ruled Karnataka.Chief Minister Kamal Nath - who barely had time to recover from an earlier bout of dissidence by seven other MLAs - rushed to meet Sonia Gandhi and then announced a rejig of his state cabinet in a desperate bid to get some of the MLAs to come around.The late night move also saw Nath getting 20 of his ministers to resign from the cabinet to signal to dissidents that many slots were open for the taking if they chose to come back to Bhopal.Scindia's exit puts the 15-month-old Congress government in MP on the verge of a collapse. Of the 230 seats in the MP assembly, 120 were held by the ruling combine of Congress and minor parties, 107 by the BJP and two were vacant."The Congress government will not survive and we will sit in the opposition and run the party's programs strongly. Whoever is gone has gone," Congress leader Laxman Singh told reporters.