Calendar girl Renuka

Lok Sabha MP Renuka Chowdhury has, quite literally, become the Congress party’s calendar girl in Andhra Pradesh. As part of her publici...

Lok Sabha MP Renuka Chowdhury has, quite literally, become the Congress party’s calendar girl in Andhra Pradesh. As part of her publicity material for her election campaign, she’s had a calendar 2004 printed, showing her in 12 different poses and 12 different costumes. There’s one of her in Lakhnavi andaaz, another of her in a tribal costume, a third with her hair in a mass of curls clustered on her forehead, and so on.

Apparently, the calendar is quite a hit with folks in her constituency, Khammam, where she’s distributed it far and wide. The party’s Andhra ally, the Telengana Rashtra Samiti, however, isn’t impressed. It is opposing Chowdhury’s candidature on grounds that she’s an ‘‘outsider’’. The TRS, whose chief demand is a separate state, has demanded that only those born and bred in Telengana be allowed to contest from the region.

Congress spokesman Jaipal Reddy, too, is being given a hard time by another ally in Andhra. The CPI(M) is laying claim to his constituency, Miryalguda. It has a strong presence there and wants to field one of its local leaders. Such are the perils of coalition politics.

The other Gandhi

The BJP is determined to make this a Gandhi versus Gandhi campaign. According to the party grapevine, Maneka’s son, Varun, is being reserved to trail Priyanka through the elections. He will follow wherever she goes. The question is: can Varun neutralise Priyanka’s spell?

Judging by his interaction with media persons at a dinner party recently, he’s got some of the Gandhi charisma. The journalists were quite taken by Varun’s informality and communication skills as well as his ease with the Hindi language. Incidentally, the interaction happened at the farmhouse of a leading editor who made waves a few weeks ago by hosting a luncheon in honour of Sonia Gandhi. This time, he had the other branch of the Gandhi dynasty on display at his house.

Samajwadi meets Devdas

Electoral compulsions appear to have doused the fires that raged briefly over the Amar Singh-Shah Rukh Khan spat at a film awards function in Dubai. Acutely conscious of Shah Rukh’s iconoclastic status among his Muslim voters, Mulayam Singh is believed to have ordered party workers to put a lid on the controversy. Former Congress MLA from Rae Bareli Akhilesh Singh, who’s desperately seeking a Lok Sabha ticket from the Samajwadi Party, had taken up cudgels on Amar Singh’s behalf and demanded that Shah Rukh’s films and videos be banned and boycotted in UP. He’s been told to pipe down. In fact, SP leaders are going out of their way to spread the word that Amar Singh and Shah Rukh have made up.

Stars of non-seriousness

The hardcore political lot in the Congress are not too happy with the way film stars and beauty queens have taken over these elections. When the party, after weeks of trying, succeeded in netting the likes of Moushumi Chatterjee and Zeenat Aman for its glamour stable, it was hard put to find spokesmen to announce their arrival.

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Satyavrat Chaturvedi, who was scheduled to do the briefing the day the stars were to join, refused to share the dais with them. He’s a serious politician, he told the party’s media committee. Chief spokesman Jaipal Reddy was then asked to do the honours but he too refused. Ultimately, the party’s own Page 3 props, Kamal Nath and Anand Sharma, performed the task, like loyal soldiers.

No contact in Karnataka

The BJP believes that the rath yatras by Narendra Modi, Vasundhara Raje and Uma Bharti were an important factor in the victories in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh respectively. But Ananth Kumar, the party’s state unit chief in Karnataka, is believed to have refused to plunge into the heat and dust of a mass contact programme. Although he’s succeeded in putting the BJP back on the map in Karnataka, he’s apparently not entirely confident about dislodging S M Krishna in the assembly polls. That should bring some cheer to the Congress camp.