Inside track

While the Prime Minister and Home Minister keep up an outward show of cordiality, the groupies from both sides display no such discretion and bad mouth each other openly. The fact that A.B. Vajpayee before his trip abroad did not authorise L.K. Advani to officiate as the number two in his absence is being cited as a proof of the tension between the two camps. Advani initially held an informal Cabinet meeting in his own office to discuss the Bihar Government imbroglio. Vajpayee conveyed from New York the authorisation for Advani to chair an official Cabinet meeting in his absence only a day later.

Differencesin the BJP persist over what portfolios should be allotted to Vajpayee favourites Jaswant Singh and Pramod Mahajan. Another bone of contention is whether Advani’s nominee Ram Jethmalani should be retained. The only question being whether the maverick minister will create more damage inside the Government or out of it.

Friend or foe

Poll surveys by political parties for the November Assembly elections indicate that the Congress will win convincingly in Rajasthan and Delhi, while the BJP will come out on top in Madhya Pradesh. Congress MPs hope that Assembly victories will nudge Sonia Gandhi into making a move for power at the Centre. The snag is that Sonia’s search for a perfect, risk-free scenario before the Congress makes a bid for power is a luxury which politics seldom provides.

Already the Samajwadi Party (SP), which should be rooting for the anti-BJP forces, has made it clear after the Congress’s Pachmarhi snub that it will not boost the latter’s prospects at its own expense. SP generalsecretary Amar Singh reckons that if the Congress were to win around 200 seats in a future parliamentary election, it would have little use for the SP. The SP would prefer a weak Congress. Sound logic, but should Amar Singh be quite so candid about his party’s strategy?

Fault down the line

Attorney General Soli Sorabjee’s inquiry report into the erroneous government affidavit submitted in the M.K. Bezbaruah case shows that the mistake in the affidavit goes back to 1997, long before the present government came to power. It seems that the babus in the Ministry of Personnel, in typing out the affidavit, used as a reference the faulty xerox copy of an Office Memorandum (OM) concerning the setting up of the Independent Review Committee (IRC) for studying the nexus between criminals and politicians. Two key lines were missing from the xerox.

What is amazing is that though amicus curiae Anil Diwan pointed out in court that there was an error in the Ministry of Personnel’s affidavit in December 1997 andonce again in August this year, no one in government could detect that something was obviously wrong by the break in the sentence. Even three seasoned bureaucrats who were members of the IRC N.N. Vohra, B.G. Deshmukh and S.V. Giri did not find anything amiss when they received the faulty xerox annexed to the IRC report.

Wrong signals

L.K. Advani has to shoulder the blame for the President’s refusal to accept the Government’s recommendation on Bihar, since A.B. Vajpayee was apparently reluctant to invoke Article 356. It was actually the Samata Party’s George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar who dominated the Cabinet meeting at which the go-ahead was given for removing the Rabri Devi Government, while other ministers listened in silence.

The decision to dismiss the Government was taken before President K.R. Narayanan left for Europe. But, at the President’s suggestion, the formalities were carried out only on his return, given that there was just a day’s gap between Vajpayee’s arrival in Delhi afterthe NAM conference and Narayanan’s departure for Europe. The BJP feels that Narayanan by indicating the timing for presenting to him the Bihar Government’s dismissal proposal led them to believe that he was not averse to the move. The Government had felt particularly reassured since the President had at the same time expressed reservations about a similar step being taken in Tamil Nadu.

Narayanan has actually done a favour to the BJP Government. He has halted the automatic chain reaction of demands for sacking of state governments in Orissa, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal by its allies.

Jaya’s magnum opus

Jayalalitha has important plans for her next birthday on January 24. She will be releasing her autobiography, being published both in Hindi and English. According to insiders, Jaya is already half way through the project and keen to place on record for posterity her role in the formation of the BJP Government so that she is not blamed for being unreasonable and unhelpful.