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Keeping tabs on the political grapevine
The election to the two Rajya Sabha seats from Assam has put the Congress high command in a fix. The party has fielded Manmohan Singh and Santiuse Kujur, a tribal and a newcomer for the poll while Badruddin Ajmal’s United Democratic Front has also put up a candidate necessitating voting.
Playing politics with identity
The election to the two Rajya Sabha seats from Assam has put the Congress high command in a fix. The party has fielded Manmohan Singh and Santiuse Kujur, a tribal and a newcomer for the poll while Badruddin Ajmal’s United Democratic Front has also put up a candidate necessitating voting.
What has complicated matters is that 25 Congress MLAs have expressed their reluctance to vote for Kujur and have said that they would vote only for the prime minister. There is also resentment in the state that all the three nominees belong to minority communities.
Congress leaders are confident that both their nominees will win given the combined strength of the party and its associates. But what is worrying the locals is that the ULFA, the AGP and the AASU will have a new issue on hand. Can the question of Insiders and Outsiders ever be resolved?
Not the smoothest of highs
Diplomacy dictates that inter-country pinpricks are usually delivered behind closed doors, but Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal left visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai accompanying Indian diplomats stunned with his candour. At a recent university convocation, the CM blamed Afghanistan for a key problem afflicting the youth of his state — heroin.
“Mr Karzai, please stop the heroin coming to India from Afghanistan,” Badal said, addressing Karzai at Jalandhar’s Lovely Professional University. “Drugs are affecting us in a big way,” Badal added, in what is also a surprising about turn from his party’s position on drugs in Punjab.
The Shiromani Akali Dal had criticised Congress leader Rahul Gandhi last year when he had argued that drugs were hurting Punjab’s youth, but now seems convinced that opium is clearly not the best medicine for his masses.
Much ado about NaMo
Senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj is livid over a newspaper report that she left the May 21 meeting of the BJP parliamentary board because of the maiden presence of Gujarat strongman Narendra Modi. Given her uneasy ties with Modi, she lost no time in clarifying on Twitter that she had to leave early because she was to attend a lunch hosted by President Pranab Mukherjee.
Swaraj may not be enthusiastic about Modi’s projection for the top slot as a prime ministerial candidate, but she won’t brook any bid to worsen their ties. “The contents of the story are imaginary and far from the truth,” she said, but it would be wise to remember that fact can be stranger than fiction.
A convenient change of heart
RJD chief Lalu Prasad is keen to have an alliance with the Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Ever since UPA 2 came back to power in 2009 and he was not taken in the Union Cabinet, Prasad has been making overtures to the Congress leadership.
At a UPA event last week, he was heard saying that the NDA benefited in Bihar in 2009 because the Congress and RJD votes were divided.
“It was all my mistake,” he was heard telling everyone. Seeing senior Congress leader Shakeel Ahmed, Prasad pointed out that he lost only because there was no alliance between the two parties. The power of two can always compensate for the solitude of just the one.
A new kind of spot-fixing
The Unique Identification Authority of India staged a ploy to show that it was efficient enough. It was decided that Montek Singh Ahluwalia would play protagonist.
While on stage, Ahluwalia pretended he had lost his original Aadhaar card and wanted a duplicate copy. Within an hour a copy was delivered to Ahluwalia in front of an impressed media.
A closer analysis, however, showed that the entire sequence of events was carefully constructed. Since the planning commission deputy chairperson hadn’t given UIDAI officials his mobile number, we can only assume that his fortune was just the result of UIDAI’s missed call getting through.
