Trying to regain the lost political ground, Human Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi seems to have gone on a public relations overdrive.The latest to join his PR bandwagon is R K Sinha, former media advisor to Bangaru Laxman. He joins Joshi’s already sizeable PR core group comprising former journalist Atanu Bhattacharya, three PIB officials and media advisor R Balashankar.Though Sinha has been hired to advise the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) on ‘‘the security’’ of numerous labs spread across the country, sources say his brief is to look after his political account. ‘‘He is basically expected to help the minister keep in touch with the party workers and the party machinery,’’ says a senior official.Sinha, who has no background in science, was thrust up on CSIR much against the wishes of the D G, R.S. Mashelkar, who, sources said, ‘‘sat on the file for four months before bowing down.’’ Sihna was appointed on the CSIR payroll by showing him as a ‘‘security advisor’’ as he owned a security service business in Delhi.In October, former journalist Atanu Bhattacharya was hired by Joshi for the HRD department. Joshi already has three senior Press Information Bureau officials looking after the day-to-day publicity of his two ministries and one media Advisor, R. Balashankar, who has been with him ever since he joined the Atal Behari Vajpayee cabinet.Dilip Cherian’s Perfect Relations was hired eight months ago for handling the publicity for his pet projects Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (the programme for universalisation of education) and the under-water site found in Gulf of Cambay by the Indian Institute of Oceanography.Though Cherian says his company handled the ‘‘publicity for the SSA and Cambay under-water discovery,’’ he denied that he was also managing the Minister’s Allahabad constituency.There has been a feeling in the Joshi camp that he is sidelined in the party though he was once part of the BJP triumvirate. Joshi’s photograph, for instance, was not used with an article on five years of Vajpayee Government in the party mouthpiece BJP Today. ‘‘A government is run by a team, not individuals (the photograph only had Prime Minister Vajpayee and Deputy PM L.K. Advani in it),’’ one his advisors complained.
