Creaming the quota

President Abdul Kalam is to address the Budget Session of Parliament on February 25 at 11 am. Some superstitious supporters of the UPA government from the South are a trifle jittery since the inauspicious rahu kalam period falls between 10.30 am and noon that day. Suggestions have been made that the opening day should be changed to a day when rahu kalam falls in the evening. But now that the date has been officially announced, the government can ill-afford to retreat.

Old-timers in the Congress recall that in 1991 Rajiv Gandhi announced the party’s candidates during a rahu kalam despite their objections to the timing. Tragic events shortly afterwards reinforced their superstitions.

Moving mainstream

Apart from English, the lingua franca at the CPI(M) headquarters at A K G Bhawan is either Bengali or Malayalam. Most of the comrades hail from Bengal or Kerala. And generally print media journalists covering the party belong to these two States as well. Very few senior party members, apart from Prakash Karat, Sitaram Yechuri and Harkishen Singh Surjeet are fluent in Hindi. But with increasing interest in the Left thanks to its dominant role in the UPA government, television channels have started assigning correspondents to cover the Left beat full time and most of them are from the North. Which explains why several comrades have been trying to brush up their Hindi of late.

The Communists are keen to expand their base to the country’s heartland. The CPI(M) is holding its national conference in March in Delhi and the CPI has chosen nearby Chandigarh as the venue for its national conference.

Fair weather forecast

Cabinet Secretary B K Chaturvedi kept badgering the Director General of the Metrological Department about the weather conditions in Delhi last week. The skies looked grey and overcast and Chaturvedi telephoned anxiously more than once to inquire whether the weather forecasters were certain it would not rain around noon that day. The Met Department went into a flurry of overdrive to re-confirm its forecast, as they assumed that a major open-air governmental exercise was scheduled.

Actually, Chaturvedi was so concerned simply because his wife was hosting an outdoor lunch party for IAS officers and their spouses at his Prithviraj Road bungalow and he wanted to ensure that his guests did not get drenched or stay away. The Cabinet Secretary need not have worried on the latter score since all career-minded senior bureaucrats ensured their spouses turned up for the boss’s wife’s do.

Not quite Sonia

An important visitor from Pakistan who hopes to come to India in March is Chaudhary Shujat Hussain, the leader of the Pakistan Muslim League (QA) in Parliament. Already Husain has chalked out three things he wants to do in India. Watch the cricket series between India and Pakistan, undergo ayurvedic treatment in Kerala and meet Sonia Gandhi.

Husain’s followers like to compare their leader’s status with that of Sonia Gandhi. Just as Sonia is the power behind the Manmohan Singh government, so is Husain the man whose support to Musharaf is essential for his continuance in office, they claim. They boast that Husain’s party won the largest number of seats in the election and his younger brother is Chief Minister of Punjab. His detractors, however, dismiss comparisons to Sonia, pointing out that he is there at Musharraf’s sweet will and not vice versa.

Prickly Friendship

The buzz in the Congress headquarters is that the relationship between Ambica Soni and her one time protege Ahmed Patel has soured ever since Patel took over the post of political secretary to Sonia Gandhi and moved closer than Soni to the party’s power centre. But whenever the two meet in public, they make it a point to affect a show of mutual warmth and friendship. At the lunch hosted by Information and Broadcasting Minister Jaipal Reddy last week, Soni and Patel greeted each other so effusively that the host asked loudly why the photographers were not taking a picture of the two exchanging pleasantries.

But it was a different story a fortnight earlier on the day the Manohar Parrikar government in Goa fell. The normally circumspect Ahmed goofed up by inquiring in the presence of journalists sitting in Soni’s office whether the BJP government had been dismissed, before the deed had actually been done. Soni focussed on his faux pas once Ahmed left the room by asking the correspondents why they had let Ahmed off the hook so easily and not grilled him.