Size Matters For Munna Singh

Size and strength need not match, believes UP8217;s Congress chief Munna Singh. He has just constituted the largest ever state executive wi...

Size and strength need not match, believes UP8217;s Congress chief Munna Singh. He has just constituted the largest ever state executive with as many as 305 members. He8217;s got 21 vice presidents, 34 general secretaries and 64 secretaries. All for a state in which the party won only 25 of the 404 assembly seats. It8217;s a record of sorts. Till Singh came along, Salman Khursheed had the dubious distinction of heading the biggest pradesh committee with 274 members. The next man, Jaiswal, stopped at 232. Singh clearly wanted to make a big splash. But he8217;s landed himself with a gigantic problem. The UP Congress office on Lucknow8217;s Mall Avenue doesn8217;t have a large enough conference room to house a UPCC of this size. Singh8217;s detractors may have found a handy excuse to bunk meetings.

When The Going Gets Tough8230;

After displaying a strange reluctance for foreign jaunts in the first half of his tenure, Atal Bihari Vajpayee now seems to be going the way of Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, both of whom travelled abroad frequently in the last years of their tenures to escape from domestic headaches. Vajpayee8217;s aides have drawn up a hectic schedule for him, starting with an eight-day trip to New York in September for the United Nations General Assembly Meet.

He barely gets back and he8217;s off again, this time to Maldives, the only neighbouring country Vajpayee hasn8217;t yet visited. Come October and the PM will be travelling to Cyprus and then Denmark for the Indo-European Union Meet.

In November, he8217;ll be in Cambodia for the Indo-ASEAN Meet. In December, China beckons Vajpayee, provided that the dates can be worked out. In January, according to Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha8217;s announcement in Kathmandu, the PM is scheduled make the all-important visit to Pakistan to attend the SAARC Summit. That8217;s a pretty heavy agenda on the foreign affairs front.

Missile Takes A Left Turn

There8217;s a delicious irony in the way Left leaders are eating their words about Abdul Kalam. The President8217;s Gujarat visit was the first shock for them. Then came his decision to return the electoral reforms ordinance. CPIM Politburo member Sitaram Yechury was the first off the block to give a sound byte in praise of Kalam. He even admitted that the Left parties may have been wrong in their assessment of the new President who, he said, was displaying an unexpected streak of independence. Yechury was so taken by Kalam8217;s rap to the Government that he quite forgot that the ordinance which the President sent back was the product of an all party consensus. And his own party had been the loudest in backing the ordinance clauses which Kalam questioned. Maybe, it8217;s watching the discomfiture in the BJP that8217;s got the Left discovering virtues in Kalam which it had clearly missed when it put up Laxmi Sehgal to contest against him.

Safe Landings For Hussain

Civil Aviation Minister Shahnawaaz Hussain will break a jinx in his career as a minister at the end of this month. He will complete one year in his present ministry. He8217;s been denied this privilege ever since he joined the Council of Ministers in 1999, with his portfolio being changed almost every time Vajpayee expanded and reshuffled his team. From food processing, he shifted to human resource development, then to coal and mines and finally to civil aviation. Little wonder then that Hussain was the most tense of all the ministers at the last two swearing in ceremonies, especially since an influential lobby in the BJP has been pushing hard to have him replaced.