Babbar’s ‘new’ friends

Room for one more

Large rooms in the Prime Minister’s Office are hard to come by, but there are no claimants as yet for the office space in South Block vacated by former Minister of State in the PMO, Vijay Goel. The fear is that the room is jinxed and those who occupy it leave the PMO shortly afterwards. Bhabani Sen Gupta who was appointed as adviser by former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral had barely moved into the office when he had to vacate after an indiscreet interview to The Indian Express. During Vajpayee’s first tenure as Prime Minister, Pramod Mahajan as the Prime Minister’s aide and spokesman for the Government, took over the room. H.K. Dua as the PM’s press adviser was the next occupant, but in the wake of murmurs about the PM’s deteriorating press relations despite a plethora of high-powered advisers, he moved to our embassy in Denmark. Goel stepped in when he was appointed as MoS in the PMO. With his transfer last month, the office is empty once more. Any takers?

Blame Kulkarni, not Kalam

President Abdul Kalam’s speech at the opening session of Parliament was so lengthy that Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat collapsed while reading the Hindi version. The fault for the hour-long speech lies not with the President but with the PMO, especially speech writer Sudheendra Kulkarni. It is the PMO which drafts the speech and sends it to the Cabinet Secretary for formal clearance. The President’s Parliament address is a tradition inherited from the British and was originally meant to simply give an idea of the legislation the government hoped to introduce during the budget session and its general policies. In recent years, political statements have been slipped into the text, but all the same the speeches have seldom taken more than 20 minutes to read out. This year’s hour-long speech, with another hour for its Hindi version to be read out was an excessively detailed report card and the bored MPs, some of whom dozed off, had perforce to sit through the unnecessary exercise. Small wonder that after Shekhawat’s collapse, President Abdul Kalam decreed that the Hindi speech should be taken as read.

Expense account

MPs of the parliamentary standing committee for foreign affairs were indignant on learning that the US-based ambassador at large for NRIs, Bhishm K. Agnihotri’s office rent alone is $ 11,000 a month since he operates from the super deluxe Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. His salary and perks are at the rate of an A grade ambassador which works out to around $30,000 a month. Committee members, cutting across party lines, have decided to take up the issue of Agnihotri’s expenses in relation to his utility with Foreign Minister, Yashwant Sinha. Actually the MPs did not think to pin down Foreign Secretary, Kanwal Sibal, on a crucial aspect of the ambassador’s expenses: his travel bills which are reportedly astronomical. Agnihotri thought he had carte blanche to travel first class around the world, staying at the best hotels. In the bargain, he has overshot his very generous travel budget!

De-pressing attitude

The Congress should take a lesson from the BJP in media relations. Last Sunday, when Sonia Gandhi hosted a dinner for Opposition leaders at 10 Janpath the Capital’s press corps was kept hanging out in the cold, on the road, for over two hours waiting for crumbs of information. Unlike the BJP office, where there is a special room for the press corps, and Race Course Road, where an enclosure has been constructed for journalists to sit, at the Gandhi residence the media is kept at a distance and not even permitted into the lane leading to the back entrance. The only refreshments available are peanuts and chana sold by passing vendors, whereas journalists covering the Prime Minister’s Office-cum-house recall gratefully that on occasion the PM’s foster daughter, Namita Bhattacharya, has thoughtfully sent out plates of pakoras and piping hot tea for the press corps. The worst part of covering the Congress is that information is hard to come by, since party leaders either don’t know the truth themselves or are too scared of offending the party president to provide even innocuous information.

E-mail the Author