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Look who’s talking

Taking a cue from the practice in a leading newspaper’s social columns, Prasar Bharati CEO K S Sarma wants to charge money from other government agencies for appearances on Doordarshan. The University Grants Commission was billed Rs 12.5 lakhs by DD for covering its jubilee celebrations which was addressed by President Abdul Kalam. The UGC meekly paid up. The Parliamentary Affairs Ministry has, however, ignored a DD bill of Rs 5.5 crores for the live coverage of Parliament over two days during the Opposition-sponsored no-confidence motion last year. The CEO has even approached the Election Commission that Doordarshan should be paid for the proposed broadcasts by various political parties on the national channel.

The CEO forgets that since 1998 alone the government has invested around Rs 1000 crores on the loss-making channel, which Bharati has no intention of paying back. ISRO has spent Rs 500 crores on providing rent-free satellite uplink facilities to DD. The Finance Ministry does not charge sales and entertainment taxes. In addition, Bharati has offices all over the country on properties which belonged to the government and for which no payment was made.

Only one boss

Rashid Alvi, who has been thrown out of the BSP, and Sudip Bandhopadyay who was denied a party ticket from his Kolkata North West constituency, have realised the pitfalls of trying to serve two masters at the same time. Alvi acted as Mayawati’s emissary with the BJP when Behenji was CM in UP and cultivated Advani in the hope that he would be inducted as a central minister on a BSP quota. Finding Alvi sucking up unnecessarily to the BJP, Mayawati became suspicious of him and even accused him of not effectively arguing her case in the Taj corridor matter. Similarly, Bandhopadyay went out of the way to woo the BJP leadership, hoping to be made a minister in the Vajpayee government forgetting that his first loyalty should have been to Didi.

Sent to Coventry

Najma Heptullah’s fall from grace in the Congress is not of recent origin. Her party colleagues, who learn fast who is out of favour with Madame, had stopped attending Heptullah’s dinners for the last three years. Prior to this, the deputy chairperson was a very popular hostess. In fact, in 1998, she threw the party which virtually launched Sonia Gandhi in politics and where Gandhi was introduced to the media for the first time.

By last year, however, Heptullah’s ex-communication was so complete that when she organised an audio visual show on gender budgeting under the auspices of the UNDP in Parliament, every Congress MP was missing though most other women MPs showed up. The RJD’s Saroj Dubey explained to the deputy chairperson that a senior Congress Rajya Sabha MP had met her in the corridor and warned her that Heptullah was out of favour with Soniaji and she should stay away from her function. Dubey retorted that since she was not in the Congress she was not obliged to follow the Congress leader’s likes and dislikes. On Id, Heptullah received a telephone call from 10 Janpath from one of Gandhi’s secretaries asking her to stay on the line as Madame wanted to speak to her. After a while he reverted apologetically to say that he had made a mistake and Soniaji did not want to speak to her. Realising that the secretary must have assumed that Gandhi would be wishing her for Id, Heptullah retorted tartly on the telephone that one even greets one’s enemies on Id.

On whose side?

The RJD has units in all the southern states, but nobody, including party president Laloo Yadav, takes their prospects very seriously considering there are few Yadavs to be found south of the Vindhyas. Laloo was taken aback last week when the state party president in Andhra Pradesh flew down to Patna to plead that she be allowed to put up 150 candidates for the forthcoming Assembly elections. Laloo who will be going to Hyderabad to campaign for the Congress smelt a rat and told his party functionary firmly that at most she could field five candidates, more than that would only benefit Chandrababu Naidu.