Not just Maya

Mahajan has made his political preferences very public even joking against the BSP leader in a speech with the quip that Mayawati is reading Manusmriti as moneysmriti.

Caught for cover-up

While the former Secretary, Environment, K C Mishra has been put on compulsory wait for tampering with the file concerning clearances for the Taj corridor project, the name of the concerned minister, T R Balu, does not figure in the CBI investigations. Balu has been let off the hook since the file was not sent to him for initialling. Ironically, Mishra has got into hot water not for his original remarks on the file which can be justified — the noting talks about clearance only after considering the pollution and environmental impact — but for overwriting on the original notation when it was called for by the CBI.

Competitive edge

The proposal for a Competition Commission to handle the work of the BIFR and MRTP with Commerce Secretary Deepak Chatterjee as chairman and then Secretary, Company Affairs, Vinod Dhal as its member-secretary was announced in mid-June. But though both senior bureaucrats accepted the new jobs, neither seems to be in a hurry to join.

Chatterjee was exempted from taking charge immediately on the grounds that he was required for the WTO negotiations, but even after his return from Cancun the commerce secretary has given no indication that he is planning to take over his new charge. Dhal, meanwhile, continues as OSD in the Ministry of Company Affairs on the plea that the chairman of the commission has yet to take charge.

Dhal retires in January and Chatterjee next June and at this rate the two can have their cake and eat it too! The five-year tenure of their post-retirement sinecures begins only once they take up their new posts.

Better left unspoken

For three days before the ruling in the Ayodhya case HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi was closetted in his office in Shastri Bhavan with his trusted aides clearing files. Nonetheless a large number of service matters in court and approvals for academics to go abroad for seminars and conferences are held up, awaiting the minister’s clearance.

Joshi seems to have miscalculated badly by announcing his resignation unilaterally in his game of one up-manship with Advani. He now has to cool his heels while he awaits the Prime Minister’s return. The RSS, on whom he was banking, has not come to his rescue. (Though the HRD minister is more faithful to the Sangh philosophy than any other minister, he is no great favourite of the RSS which feels he is not a team leader and he creates divisions, as was apparent from his ill-fated stewardship of the BJP in the early Nineties).

Joshi’s isolation was evident from the fact that few from the Parivar called on him after the Rai Bareli judgment. When the media asked BJP spokesman Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, to comment on the lack of visitors at Joshi’s house, he remarked guilelessly, ‘‘In any case there are seldom crowds outside Joshi’s house even in normal times.’’ Realising belatedly that he had put his foot in his mouth and Joshi would take offence, Naqvi frantically telephoned pressmen requesting them to refrain from printing his remark.

Colour coordinates

Journalists who attended a press conference at UP Bhavan in Delhi after the change of guard from Mayawati to Mulayam noticed a distinct change in the colour scheme. Earlier the sofas had blue covers in the same shade as that of the BSP party flag. Now the blue covers have been replaced with green ones, matching the colours of the Samajwadi Party. In the days of the BJP government the covers were a brilliant saffron. Switching photographs of chief ministers from one regime to the next is understandable, but are other changes in interior decoration really necessary?

Opting out

Sucheta Nath Bhattacharya, the daughter of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, and Ajanta Biswas, the offspring of the all-powerful CPI(M) state unit secretary Anil Biswas, do not seem keen to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and join the party.

Both girls who were Students Federation of India( SFI) functionaries when they first enrolled at the elite Presidency College have recently distanced themselves from the students’ wing of the communist party. Ajanta, in an interview, said she wanted to join the IAS.

Perhaps like all ambitious youngsters they are conscious that when applying to a foreign university or sitting for competitive exams, membership of the SFI is a handicap.