Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Hours before Shivraj Singh Chouhan was elected chief minister of Madhya Pradesh by the BJP legislative party, a furious Uma Bharati drove to L K Advani’s Prithiviraj Road to register her protest. To the astonishment of the security guards Bharati did not get down from her car but changed her mind in the driveway and drove out of the exit gate.
The mercurial Uma Bharati is her own worst enemy. When upset she fires indiscriminately in several different directions at the same time. She has not just brought the squabbling BJP and RSS on the same side, she has even succeeded in uniting the rival party general secretaries, Pramod Mahajan, Arun Jaitley and Sanjay Joshi, by attacking each of them in turn.
Not fat, but obese weddings
The Punjab government is holding its breath till the marriage season is over, since politicians in the state are disinclined to follow Sonia Gandhi’s directive about observing simplicity. Already several VIP weddings have become the focus of controversy for their most vulgar display. When the CPI(M) patriarch Harkishen Singh Surjeet tossed aside his Marxist pretensions to participate in a glitzy and lavish wedding for his grandson in Ludhiana, a former colleague Jagjit Singh Anand wrote an article in a Punjabi daily deploring the changing value system of the heroes of the freedom movement.
Last week, Punjab Agriculture Minister Rajinder Kaur Bhattal was in the news because of the huge scale of wedding celebrations for her son in her constituency of Lehragaga in Sangrur district. There were some 20,000 guests and food and liquor flowed so freely that one of the guests collapsed and died. Bhattal disowned responsibility, claiming that the dead was a gate crasher. The Punjab Police did not even bother to register an FIR.
Now Chief Minister Amarinder Singh’s media adviser Bharat Inder Singh Chahal, is in the eye of a wedding storm, even before the marriage of his son. The pre nuptial shagun ceremony was the last word in extravagance. There were a reported 100 dishes for the guests, Rs 2 lakhs was spent on decorations alone and potted plants lined the road to the venue for some 500 metres. The groom was gifted a Mercedes car by the father of the bride-to-be. Perhaps another wedding to watch will be the marriage of Minister for Cooperative Jasjit Singh Radhawa’s daughter.
Touching a raw nerve
Of late, the light-hearted sparring between Congress general secretary Ambica Soni and Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmed Patel is getting more than a trifle tangy. Last week in Parliament’s Central Hall, Soni,on seeing Patel entering, stood up and saluted jestingly in recognition of his superior status. (After all, most Congresspersons attribute Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi’s elevation as Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and I&B to his good friend Patel.)
Soni’s lieutenant, Jairam Ramesh, abruptly got up from the bench when Patel approached and moved to the next row where Soni was sitting. ‘‘Is he treating you as an untouchable?’’ a journalist queried of Ahmed. To which Ahmed replied tartly, ‘‘Water finds its own level.’’
Lost in translation
AIADMK MP K Malaisamy finds himself at a disadvantage at meetings of the Business Advisory Council of the Rajya Sabha because he does not know Hindi. Last week, when he saw Rajya Sabha chairman Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and other MPs laughing heartily at a joke in Hindi he felt frustrated and begged Shekhawat to translate for him. The Vice President obligingly translated but added the rider that while there was no compulsion for him to learn Hindi, some knowledge of the language might prove useful to him.
Two days later, the MP received a letter in Hindi informing him that he had been appointed a member of Parliament’s Hindi Salhakar Samiti. Malaichami got the hint but he is still deciding whether or not he should attend the Hindi committee’s next meeting.
Slip not showing
By a coincidence, two central ministers from Andhra, Jaipal Reddy and Chandrashekhar Rao, slipped in the bathroom of their respective houses last week. Reddy’s injuries were minor, but Rao had to be admitted to AIIMS. The minister seemed anxious to keep the news of his fall secret. So much so that a Congress MP who had sent in a written question to the Labour Ministry for a reply in Question Hour in Parliament last week left the House before the question could come up for discussion. Which is why the minister’s absence was not noticed.
