Catching by surprise

While civil aviation secretary K N Srivastava is set to retire on December 31,the government is yet to decide on a new name. An official said it was unusual that the decision for such an important post had not been made with only a week left for Srivastavas retirement. Last year,his name had been cleared long before the retirement of the then civil aviation secretary Naseem Zaidi.

Minority language

The Congress may have projected it as consultations with minority communities for the partys manifesto but the AICC made little effort to hide who its focus group was. It issued a press release not just in English and Hindi,as it usually does,but also in Urdu. Given the fact that representatives of other minority communities like Sikhs and Parsis also attended the consultation meeting,the ruling partys priorities seemed quite clear.

War on words

Soon after taking over as BJP president early this year,Rajnath Singh had decided to do away with the system of core group,an informal group of the party top brass modelled on Congresss group. The party Monday decided to shed another Congress nomenclature for its electoral campaign. An informal meeting of partys central election management committee is learnt to have agreed not to use war room nomenclature and agreed to use campaign office for its Lok Sabha campaign management centre at the party headquarters.