Bharat Bhavan chief cocks another snook

The 72-year-old retired bureaucrat, who was incharge of the BJP’s culture cell till the present assignment, has stuck his neck out taking on the Government, which wants him out and could use the Sunday meeting to hasten his exit.

An inquiry, which was conducted by the Government last month without hearing him, has already sealed Sinha’s fate. But the Government did not act on it hoping that the playwright would resign on his own ending a dispute that has sullied the image of the prestigious arts complex.

But Sinha seems to be in no mood to relent. At Sunday’s meeting, the Chairman and his four supporters even accepted the resignation of one member and appointed a new one in his place. While the total strength of the trust is 11, meaning that Sunday’s meeting lacked quorum, Sinha’s argument was that the resignation of one brought this down to five members.

A special audit to go into the expenditure over the last six months as well as constitution of a two-member committee to find out what went wrong in that period and to fix responsibility were the other two important decisions taken.

Not surprisingly, the next day, the other camp declared the Sunday meeting invalid, saying there was no quorum and the remaining members had not been informed. Rules can be changed only when three-fourth of the members are present at a meeting specially called for the purpose.

Official sources indicated that the Government will soon restructure the trust keeping Sinha out. Sinha, however, maintained that the Government had no such powers because he was duly elected by trustees.

Sinha, who is based in Delhi, had a long-running battle with previous trust secretary Rameshwar Mishra ‘Pankaj’, who resigned recently. While the Government had asked both Sinha and Mishra to resign following their public sparring — both called each other names and washed their dirty linen in public — the Chairman has made it clear that he would like to go out on his own terms.

While Mishra flaunted his proximity to Culture Minister Sharma, Sinha is believed to have knocked on the doors of senior Sangh Parivar leaders like L K Advani and RSS chief K Sudershan. Since Mishra’s resignation, Culture Secretary Manoj Srivastava, an IAS officer, has been appointed secretary of the trust.

Sunday’s meeting was therefore surprising in more ways than one. With Mishra gone, nobody expected Sinha to up the ante by calling a meeting of his supporters.