Double Dilemma

Not Yet Over

The exoneration of Rajiv Gandhi by the Delhi High Court in the Bofors case has inspired the Congress to bring out advertisements proclaiming that Rajiv Gandhi has finally been vindicated. But the party should perhaps have left well alone since a new debate can only generate fresh controversy. First, former Cabinet Secretary B G Deshmukh has raked up some uncomfortable memories. More embarrassing for the party could be the fact that in Sweden the former public prosecutor, Sten Linstrom, who investigated the case, is now willing to come on record. Linstrom reportedly feels that Sonia Gandhi should be interrogated to find out if there is any link to Ottavio Quattrocchi.

Maverick or Maligned?

Uma Bharti feels she is a victim of her image as a maverick sanyasin created by the media. Such characterisations, Bharti claims, ignore the fact that she works 18 hours a day on the job of which five hours are spent simply meeting ministers, MLAs, MPs and common folk and she has no pending files on her table. If she spends her rest hours visiting temple it is her private business, she says.

Espying double standards, Bharti notes that when her predecessor Digvijay Singh had built a temple with images of several gods in the chief minister’s compound it caused little comment. But when she took over as chief minister and put up a simple shiv lingam for her personal puja there was an outcry. Her shiv lingam temple can be uprooted and moved along with her when she demits office, but Singh’s temple is a permanent structure since the deities have been consecrated and cannot be removed.

Holiday Footnotes

There is a footnote to Rudy’s holiday extravaganza in Goa. We know that Rudy finally coughed up the Taj Hotel bill of Rs 2.70 lakh which was originally to have been settled by the Airports Authority of India. But it is still not clear as to who is picking up the tab for the Leela Penta hotel bills of the two officials and their families who accompanied Rudy on the trip.

After the story broke in The Indian Express Rudy tried to put up a defence by claiming that his predecessors in office had similarly used PSUs as milch cows for getting various facilities from air conditioners at their residences to payment of their laundry bills abroad. But while it was okay for Rudy to mention former Congress ministers like Madhavrao Scindia and Ghulam Nabi Azad, the BJP cautioned him against citing the example of his immediate predecessor Shahnawaz Hussain in his defence.

No Feel-Good Translation

The Hindi translation for BJP’s campaign slogan ‘Shining India’ is Bharat Uday but the NDA’s other catch phrase ‘Feel Good’ has not been translated into Hindi. The English expression ‘Feel Good’ remains in the Hindi ads and even in Hindi speeches by BJP leaders. The joke making the rounds is that the BJP media planners first translated the expression as sukhadmai ehsas only to discover that there was a condom ad with the same wording.

(Im) Pertinent Query

To showcase Sonia Gandhi’s greater accessibility, the Congress arranged two meetings with the Capital’s media: a lunch for correspondents and a dinner for editors. Logistics were carefully worked out so that Gandhi moved from table to table fielding questions and each journalist was entitled to put a query. But at the diwan-e-aam when a news agency reporter queried whether she would permit former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao to sit with her on the dais during the campaign now that he had been cleared in the Lakhubhai Pathak case, the Congress president took offence and walked away in a huff without completing the table’s quota of questions.

Clearly, Congress’s media relations are not as bad as one assumed, since loyalist journalists at the lunch promptly pounced on the hapless correspondent who posed the query, chiding him for his impudence. One media person even suggested that journalists like him should be blackballed in future.