Discordant Note ON A day the BJP remembered the contributions of late former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee on his birth anniversary, a Congress member’s tweets set off a war of words. Gaurav Pandhi, an AICC coordinator with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s office, tweeted that Vajpayee had boycotted the Quit India Movement and worked as a British informant. His tweets came hours before the Congress announced that Rahul Gandhi would be visiting Vajpayee’s memorial on Monday to pay tributes, leading BJP leaders to cry foul. BJP spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla called for Pandhi’s sacking if Rahul truly respects the former PM. Chatham House Rules INSTITUTE FOR Defence Studies and Analyses this week held the Y B Chavan memorial lecture, but it came up with a twist: Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan’s lecture was to be under Chatham House rules. The media was kept away, and so much so that IDSA members from the media fraternity were also dis-invited. This created a bit of displeasure among the members of the Institute, which is funded by the Defence Ministry. The Scramble BY PUBLICISING the status of landfill remediation plans prepared by states and Union Territories under Swachh Bharat Mission-Urban 2.0, the Union Housing and Urban Affairs Ministry has set off a competition among them. The ministry’s dumpsite dashboard went live about a month ago, with details of how many legacy landfills a state has and the progress of their remediation plans. Within days of the information being made public and media reports on it, states scrambled to update their data to show further progress. Prior to the dashboard, the number of landfills sites in the country and the amount of garbage piled up was not clearly known.
