Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The new Chief Vigilance Commissioner, P Shankar, is not the Tamil Nadu chief minister’s candidate. In fact, Jayalalithaa refused to even meet her former chief secretary when he visited Chennai as a Planning Commission member and sought an appointment.
The reason for her disillusionment with Shankar is interesting. The convent educated Jayalalithaa prides herself on her command of English, and was furious when a note from her planning secretary was put to her with the grammatically incorrect sentence, ‘‘We is submitting’’.
Jayalalithaa circled the mistake with a red pen and in the margin caustically commented on the slipping standards of the IAS. She ordered Shankar as chief secretary to remove the secretary for incompetence.
Shankar pleaded on behalf of the officer, explaining that the wrong grammar was probably a slip by one of the secretary’s juniors. But that infuriated the chief minister further since she felt the secretary should have personally vetted the copy before sending it to her.
The upshot of the spat was that Shankar sought voluntary retirement. He withdrew his resignation after New Delhi appointed him to the Planning Commission.
Wrong Suspects
Jayalalithaa’s public outburst against Sonia Gandhi was not out of the blue. When the Congress candidate for vice president, Sushil Kumar Shinde, met her in Chennai to canvass support, she wanted to know why Sonia had not personally telephoned her to ask her for her vote. She launched into an angry tirade against Sonia. While the Congress blames L K Advani for Jayalalithaa’s campaign against Sonia’s foreign origins, it is more likely that her two close friends in the Opposition, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Sharad Pawar, have egged her on. Jaya, Mulayam and Pawar resent the assumption that Sonia should automatically be the anti-BJP front’s candidate for prime minister. Significantly, Jaya in her anti-Sonia speeches talks about a third front and not teaming up with the BJP. Contrary to belief, she does not plan to be part of the NDA government in its decline and shoulder the onus for the Centre’s poor governance. She plans to visit two northern towns every month to further her campaign against foreign born PMs.
Silent Support
Disinvestement Minister Arun Shourie is unlikely to win a popularity contest in the Vajpayee Cabinet. This is partly because of the nature of his portfolio, which whittles down the fiefdoms of other ministries, but also because he believes in pummelling his opponents into submission with meticulously researched facts, figures and arguments.
After Sharad Yadav lost his civil aviation portfolio for taking up cudgels against Shourie and Manohar Joshi opted to move out of the heavy industries ministry, most of Shourie’s colleagues have discretely avoided a head-on collision even though they have major differences with him on his disinvestment plans.
This includes former Fertiliser Minister S S Dhindsa, Tourism Minister Jagmohan, Urban Development Minister Ananth Kumar, Mines Minister Uma Bharati and Petroleum Minister Ram Naik. So when Defence Minister George Fernandes—who, six months earlier had written two letters to the PM explaining his concerns on disinvestment of IPCL and BPCL—took up cudgels against Shourie, he had a number of ministerial colleagues silently cheering him on from the sidelines.
Hobson’s choice
Those who believe that imposition of President’s rule will provide a healthy change from Narendra Modi’s partisan administration are forgetting Governor Sunder Singh Bhandari’s track record. The 81-year-old RSS pracharak, who was one of the founders of the Jana Sangh, was transferred out of the Patna Raj Bhavan because of rank favouritism towards anti-Laloo forces. Bhandari was hardly ever seen or heard during Gujarat’s communal troubles over the past six months. Vajpayee, as a snub to Modi, appointed Bhandari as the chairman of the all party relief committee for riot victims, but Bhandari has seldom bothered to convene a meeting of the committee.
House Hunt
Health Minister Shatrughan Sinha confidently assumed that he would automatically be provided a larger bungalow now that he is in the Cabinet. But, despite Sinha’s wife Poonam running from pillar to post, he has been unable to secure his rightful ministerial accommodation.
Sinha was first promised 4, Krishna Menon Marg, but just as he was about to move in, he was told that Krishan Kant’s widow wanted the house for herself and no other ministerial bungalows are immediately available.
There was a time when the Rajya Sabha housing committee’s was more starry-eyed about Bollywood. Shabana Azmi even though she was a first time MP, jumped the queue and was allotted a ministerial bungalow which was several notches above her entitlement.
The ministers and MPs she bypassed for a house consider it poetic justice that Shabana’s much coveted bungalow on Ashoka Road has turned out to have a less than ideal location. Digging for a metro station is going on nearby and part of her compound has been appropriated.
