‘Lalled’ into complacency

Prodigal nephew

After Pramod Mahajan, the BJP leader who addressed the largest number of rallies in Maharashtra was Varun Gandhi. The 24-year-old delivered speeches at some 60 different locations and attracted large crowds. To detract from his efforts, a Marathi and a Hindi news agency put out a story suggesting that Maneka Gandhi’s son was planning to defect to the Congress after the Maharashtra polls and claimed that Varun had met his aunt thrice in this connection. The report, published by many newspapers, gained credence after Sonia herself publicly announced that her party’s doors were always open to her nephew.

But once the campaign was over, the Congress no longer seemed anxious to reclaim the prodigal nephew. Rahul Gandhi in an interview remarked that he had no knowledge of any plan for Varun to join the Congress. After all in any dynasty the line of succession is clearly delineated and no one wants to muddy the waters by bringing in rival claimants to the throne.

If Varun himself was not overly concerned in denying the rumours it could be because he was keen to send home the message to the BJP that he could not be taken for granted and should be accorded the status due to one of the party’s star campaigners.

DMK’s Jai Hindi

The presence of M Karunanidhi’s grand-nephew and the DMK’s most high profile face in Delhi, Dayanidhi Maran, at the book release of the Hindi translations of the works of Tamil poet Vairamuthu was surprising considering that the DMK first came to prominence on an anti-Hindi agitation. Maran’s explanation was that his party was not against Hindi per se but only against its imposition on the South. But an older generation of the party which had participated in violent street battles against the three-language formula was less tolerant. Only four of the 12 central ministers from Tamil Nadu showed up for the function.Curiously, just recently Maran himself had suggested that a Hindi translator should be present at Cabinet meetings.

In fact at a Cabinet meeting last week, Health Minister Anbumani Ramdoss of the PMK protested that he could not understand a word of what Laloo Prasad Yadav was saying in Hindi about the Population Commission. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh turned to Montek Singh Ahluwallia and asked him to translate.

De facto president

The knives are out in the BJP and the Maharashtra results will only sharpen the divide in the party. BJP party president Venkaiah Naidu is on shaky ground and what is saving him is not his bluster and bad puns, but the fact that there is no agreement on a replacement. Sushma Swaraj, for instance, is the preferred candidate of RSS chief K Sudershan.

L K Advani meanwhile has quietly stepped in to take over the reigns of the party even if he does not have the official position. The opposition to Advani comes curiously enough from the RSS which wants the BJP to return to its roots. The RSS blames Vajpayee and Advani for ignoring the party’s saffron agenda during the six years it was in power. While the RSS is pushing for hardline Hindutva, many in the party are convinced that such a course of action would be suicidal.

Pointed objection

Programme Implementation Minister Oscar Fernandes wants to resurrect the 20-point programme which was introduced during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime. The Congress has given its nod but the proposal is yet to come up before the Cabinet. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is reluctant to adopt the programme since he fears that the Left will object on the grounds that it is outside the UPA’s Common Minimum Programme and the nomenclature has a certain stigma attached to it thanks to its Emergency association.

Poll pot

Political parties are quick to read motives when poll surveys predict their defeat, accusing the pollsters of giving their political rivals an unfair advantage. But when a TV channel predicted a clear win for the Congress in Maharashtra, the party was far from grateful and interpreted it instead as a sinister plot to lull its workers into a false sense of complacency.