Tell-tale heads

Golfing quid pros

The exclusive Delhi Golf Club with over a 100 acres of land in the heart of New Delhi is a source of heartburn for many. Several years back that crusader for lost causes, Baljit Malik, filed a PIL questioning the government’s right to lease out prime land, which has some ASI-protected monuments on it, for a pittance. However, when the lease came up for renewal last year, the Ministry of Urban Development agreed to its renewal after a modest increase in fee. Behind-the-scenes a quid pro quo deal was struck by which 175 influential politicians, judges and bureaucrats were to be co-opted as members of the club, for a five-year period. The division of the unofficial quota was 125 senior bureaucrats, (25 memberships were exclusively for the IAS’s Union Territory cadre), 25 judges, five law officers and 20 MPs. It was left to the ministry’s discretion how to dole out the membership.

Recently, two Delhi journalists close to the government were ‘‘invited’’ to join the club by the ministry. The membership offer seems a fall-out of an investigation into the club’s membership policy by a national media group of late bent on tarnishing the reputation of a Central minister. The minister was faxed a lengthy questionnaire enquiring about his golf handicap to pinpoint that he never actually played the game as the club rules require. Other quid pro quo non-golf playing members seem to have got jittery. The article was scuttled and curiously around the same time the ministry offered membership to the editor of the group, who old timers at the club grumble knows so little about the game that he probably assumes a caddy is meant to serve tea.

Diversionary trap

Raking up issues like cow protection, tantric sacrifices and offering cakes with eggs to the Gods may be good for newspaper headlines, but the Gujarat experience should have taught MP Chief Minister Digvijay Singh that those swayed by the saffron ideology will opt for the A rather than the B team of Hindutva. The savvy Singh’s real objective in propagating the saffron cause is not votes but to divert the attention of his BJP rival Uma Bharti. After 10 years in government, Singh is conscious that the anti-incumbency factor is high particularly over the acute power shortages in the state and the condition of the roads. Singh would rather discuss Hindutva than the state’s development for the forthcoming assembly poll. BJP President Venkaiah Naidu and Arun Jaitley, who is looking after the party campaign in MP have a tough time steering the mercurial Bharti and her equally volatile followers away from joining issue with Singh over trivial non-issues.

Jiskee lathi…

Laloo Prasad Yadav’s show of force at his lathi rally was not aimed solely at the BJP. It was also to shame his rival caste leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and demonstrate that he was not a ‘‘mouse’’ like him. Laloo is aware that there is heartburn in the Samajwadi Party that instead of fighting Mayawati on the streets with protest rallies, agitations and a ‘jail bharo’ programme Mulayam has chosen to appeal to the courts to protect him against the 137 cases the UP Chief Minister has slapped against him. Old timers in the party feel that the SP leader is growing soft, pointing out that the socialist icon Ram Manohar Lohia had never believed in seeking bail for fighting political battles.

Unsporting tactic

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj was extremely jittery last week after Congress MPs led by Priya Ranjan Das Munshi blocked a discussion on youth and sports affairs in the Lok Sabha ostensibly to protest against the disinvestment of PSUs in the oil sector. Sushma, who had assumed that it would be smooth sailing for the Finance Bill in Parliament, since contentious issues had been debated and done with earlier in the session, feared that the Congress had changed its strategy and was planning not to cooperate in passing the Budget.

The BJP top leadership hastily held a brainstorming session and sent feelers to the Congress. It turned out Swaraj had overreacted. Das Munshi had been acting on his own initiative and not on instructions from his party. Das Munshi, who has headed the Indian Football Federation for the last eight years, feared that BJP MP Kirti Azad would be posing some uncomfortable questions on football which he did not want to answer.