New Delhi, May 15 : Shivakumar, along with his dedicated team, which worked with him closely in the last two years, strove to ensure that the party gets a brute majority in the next polls with lot of work at the ground level.

Even when Shivakumar appeared before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) last year in connection with the money laundering probe, Arora was there along with the Congresss leader's brother D.K. Suresh.  In an interview with IANS, Arora opened up on the Congress' Karnataka success, saying that he was not surprised at the outcome "because we have been working in Karnataka for the last two years, we were having a regular touch and feedback and tracking service system which was telling us that Congress is performing well".  "Seat analysis was with us and we could clearly see that the numbers should be somewhere in the range of 135 to 145. Some seats we lost by very small margins, otherwise the number would have been comfortably around 140."  Amid internal fighting in the Congress camp, especially between Leader of Opposition in the outgoing Assembly and former CM Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar, which used to get most of the headlines, it was Arora who brought both together and showed them in chit chat and discussing issues of Karnataka.