Paswan for Ram Rajya

Role reversal blues

Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee confesses that his most frequent sentences of late are ‘‘please sit down’’ and ‘‘please return to your seat’’, addressed to recalcitrant MPs who keep defying the Chair’s orders to maintain decorum in the House. If Chatterjee is a trifle lenient in disciplining the MPs, it is because he is conscious that for most of his parliamentary career he was on the other side of the fence defying the Speaker’s admonitions on issues such as Bofors and Tehelka. Unfortunately, Chatterjee has in the bargain upset both members of the UPA and the Opposition with his rulings.

Chatterjee has reversed the order of his predecessors that television cameras should not focus on disruptive MPs who defy the Speaker’s orders. He has instructed Doordarshan to let the cameras roll when MPs are badly behaved in the hope that the public viewing of their antics might shame them into mending their ways.

A test case for Chatterjee’s liberalism and push for transparency will be whether he can persuade his fellow MPs to amend the antiquated rule that bars the media from covering the proceedings of Parliament’s various sub-committees and standing committees unlike most parliamentary democracies the world over. So far Chatterjee has not had any success.

Cameras can lie

Most newspapers splashed the photograph of Najma Heptullah greeting Sonia Gandhi at the Nehru Award ceremony on their front page rather than the expected picture of Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong getting his award. The photo made news because Sonia Gandhi was looking disdainfully at the former Vice Chairman of the Rajya Sabha who had ditched her party to join the BJP while Heptullah looked as if she was supplicating. Heptullah is dismayed that Congress persons would try to misinterpret her simple gesture of courtesy. As chairperson of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) she greeted all the guests in the front row with folded hands, including L K Advani.

Incidentally, trying to dislodge Heptullah as ICCR chairman, when she has some two-and-a-half years of her tenure left, is not as easy as some Congress persons would like to believe. Since the ICCR constitution specifies that the tenure of the chairperson is for three years, President Kalam would be reluctant to remove her.

Sister act

The Chaudhary sisters of Haryana — Kiran and Anuradha — stand out because of their extraordinary good looks and their go getting Jat ways. Kiran had a headstart in politics as the daughter-in-law of former Haryana Chief Minister Bansi Lal. When Anuradha, formerly the representative for a leading French fashion house, first entered politics a few years back Kiran offered sisterly advice. But thanks to her mentor Ajit Singh, Anuradha is now one up on her sister in the political sphere. She is the Irrigation Minister in the Mulayam Singh Government and has also been elected to the Lok Sabha from western UP. Anuradha has the luxury of deciding in the next three months which of the two positions she wants to relinquish.

Kiran on the other hand has lost both the Delhi Assembly and her recent Rajya Sabha election from Haryana thanks to sabotage by her Congress colleagues. She narrowly lost the Rajya Sabha seat because the crucial six votes of Independent MLAs was disallowed on the ground that the Independents had violated the Anti Defection Act. Someone from the Congress had leaked to her rival Tarlochan Singh that the Independent MLAs had attended a meeting of the Congress Legislative Party even before they had gone through the requisite formalities of switching affiliations.

Departing post haste

Union Health Minister A Ramdoss, Maharashtra Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde and Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit all left the UN AIDS conference in Bangkok by the time Sonia Gandhi arrived. Central Ministers Kapil Sibal and Oscar Fernandes who had been invited did not show up at all. Considering that normally Congress persons are anxious to be in the vicinity of their supreme leader, the haste with which ministers left Bangkok after the inaugural ceremony seemed a trifle rude. Their abrupt departures may have been because of protocol. If Ramdoss or any of the ministers had remained at the conference then automatically, because of their official positions, they would have been deemed the head of the delegation and Sonia just an ordinary member of the Indian contingent.