This Week

It was a foregone conclusion that Bhushan Bhatt,son of late Assembly Speaker Ashok Bhatt,would jump into the poll arena to try and don the mantle.

Late Speakers seat beckons his son
It was a foregone conclusion that Bhushan Bhatt,son of late Assembly Speaker Ashok Bhatt,would jump into the poll arena to try and don the mantle. So is the inevitability that he will win from Khadia. This has less to do with his fathers popularity or a sympathy wave than it has to do with the Congresss traditional inability to wrest the seat from the BJP. The Congress has nor been able even to replace its candidate,a proven habitual loser,whom it has been fielding for three elections. A Muslim leader has been asked to mobilise Muslim votes but the constituency is traditionally Brahmin-dominated.

Jumping the gun
Many in the Special Investigating Team probing the killing of Ishrat Jahan and her friends feel that SIT member Satish Verma spoke too soon. His teammates are of the view that there was no need for him to declare the encounter fake at this stage; he could have waited till the end of the investigation. His declaration,they feel,will not only sow the seed of suspicion in the minds of people but also give the kin of victims a misplaced sense of mitigation before justice actually comes their way.

Follow the leader
When Chief Minister Narendra Modi writes books on poetry,short stories and technical subjects like climate change,how can babus not follow? Quite a few bureaucrats in the Gujarat administration have been coming out with works of fiction. The latest to join the bandwagon is state tourism secretary Vipul Mittra,who has written Pyramid of Virgin Dreams. The book was released on Sunday evening and promises to tell readers what happens in the corridors of power.

Liquor taint on judges son
Not for the first time,a retired judges son has been arrested with foreign liquor. The Sayajigunj police in Vadodara arrested Vipul Raman Parmar,son of retired district judge R R Parmar,with 96 bottles of foreign liquor worth Rs 1.06 lakh on Sunday. The police said Parmar had been arrested with Indian-made foreign liquor about six years earlier too. On Sunday,he was caught transporting the liquor in his Honda City,which too has been seized. We are questioning him where this alcohol was to be sent, said inspector Piyush Sisodia.