Awareness Campaign

Nobody in the ruling class has been as troubled by the RTI in recent months as Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia

NOBODY in the ruling class has been as troubled by the RTI in recent months as Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Information like details of his foreign travel and expenditure incurred on toilets in Yojana Bhawan,obtained through RTI,has seen Ahluwalia receiving a lot of bad publicity. His office has now instructed the RTI cell of the Planning Commission that any details about him in future must be shown to be him before being disclosed. In fact,a meeting dealing with RTIs in Yojana Bhawan has been convened for Wednesday,ostensibly to increase awareness about RTIs.

Book Relief

VETERAN Congress leader the late Arjun Singhs autobiography A Grain of Sand in the Hourglass of Time,excerpts of which were released by the publisher,has come as a huge relief to Congressmen who were apprehensive of uncomfortable disclosures. Towards the fag end of his life,Singh was sidelined in the party and had even been dropped from the Cabinet in 2009. They had reasons to be apprehensive as his biography Ek Sahayatri Itihas Ka,written by journalist Ram Sharan Joshi in 2009,contained some awkward details,like his letter to Sonia Gandhi complaining that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was giving no signal to discourage a campaign against him on the OBC quota issue,or his revelation that he was not the supporter of the Emergency. Incidentally,after his death in March last year,the Congress has been very accommodative of his family. His son,Ajay Singh,was appointed the leader of the Congress legislature party in Madhya Pradesh barely six weeks after his fathers death.

Seating Adjustment

THEY may be camping in the capital for conflicting interests,but leaders of the three warring factions of Karnataka BJP left many party colleagues bemused on Tuesday as they took a joint ride in a car to meet party chief Nitin Gadkari. Chief Minister Sadananda Gowda,state BJP chief K S Eshwarappa and Lingayat leader Jagdish Shettar the last two pulling all strings to unseat the CM left Karnataka Bhavan in the same car to meet Gadkari. The three leaders remained tightlipped after their meeting.

IN LIMELIGHT

RAMAN Singh seems to be the most popular BJP Chief Minister in Delhi. He is known to share a very good rapport with Home Minister P Chidambaram as far as the strategy to deal with Naxal groups is concerned. Now his initiatives on educating children from Naxal-infested regions has come in for praise from none other than the Prime Minister himself. Raman Singh had taken a group of 150 children who have cleared competitive examinations for engineering colleges to meet the Prime Minister. Most of these kids were tribal and almost everyone came from Naxal-affected areas. Manmohan Singh was impressed. He expressed gratitude to Raman Singh and his government for understanding the importance and need for education.

NHRC VACANCY

A vacancy has been created in the National Human Rights Commission with the completion of tenure of P C Sharma,a former director of CBI. And that has quite naturally given rise to speculation about who is going to fill that vacancy. Conventionally,one member of the NHRC happens to be a retired police officer. One of the names doing the rounds is that of B K Gupta,who just retired as Delhi Police Commissioner. But if grapevine is to be believed,even the serving CBI director A P Singh could be a contender even though he still has a few months of service left. The possibility of that position being kept vacant till then is not entirely being ruled out.