Opinion Inside Track: Emergency Plan
A draft manuscript was rejected by Indira,who did not want the govt to publicise the life of Sardar Patel.
Emergency plan
At Gandhi Maidan,Patna,it was Gujarat Police officers who had flown down for the Narendra Modi rally who took charge of the situation after the blasts there on October 27. They tried to persuade BJP leaders to abort the rally. Rajnath Singh objected because he felt it would give the impression that party leaders were running away. Arun Jaitley pointed out that to call off the rally would cause a stampede and more casualties. In fact,Shahnawaz Hussain and others who were on the dais even announced that they had heard the sound of firecrackers,to reassure the crowd. Modi,who insisted on going ahead with his speech,did not refer to the blasts even once. However,the Gujarat Police had four cars ready in case more blasts took place.
In the dark
When Bihars former deputy chief minister Sushil Modi telephoned state DGP Abhayanand after the blasts,the latter was completely in the dark. He informed Modi that he had heard some firecrackers had been burst at the railway station. This is not the first time the Bihar Police has been caught napping. It was the Union Home Secretary who informed a senior Bihar Police officer of the explosions at the Mahabodhi temple in July.
Onion search
On Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs trip to China last month,the Ministry of External Affairs was perturbed to find thin attendance at an MEA briefing and at a media interaction with Montek Singh Ahluwallia. On inquiry it turned out that the missing journalists had been instructed by their TV channels to go to the Beijing vegetable market and do a report on onion prices in China,as Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar had talked of the possibility of importing onions from the country. Incidentally,the man on the street in China was not happy at the prospect of exporting onions to India. The price of cabbages in China has shot up because of exports to South Korea.
Sardar slant
Narendra Modi may have slipped up on facts,but his conclusion that the Nehru-Gandhi family had animus towards Sardar Patel is not without some basis. Indira Gandhis secretary B N Tandon recalls in his PMO Diaries that he expected the biography of Sardar to be available in the Information and Broadcasting Ministrys Makers of Modern India series. To his surprise,he found nothing on Patel. On investigation,he discovered that a draft manuscript had been rejected by Indira,who did not want the government to publicise the life of Sardar Patel.
Betrayal of trust
The Sardar Patel Memorial Trust in Ahmedabad is in the news as PM Manmohan Singh and Modi attended the function to honour Indias Iron Man on the premises last week. The Shahibaug building in which the trust is housed has a long history. It was once the palace of Shah Jahan and it was rumoured that in its underground passages there was a tunnel which stretched from Ahmedabad to Delhi. During British rule,the palace was extended to make it a residency for senior civil servants and it later became the governors residence. Rabindranath Tagore wrote his short story The Hungry Stones while staying there. Logically,the palace should have been handed over to the ASI. Instead,as Gujarat CM,Babubhai Patel donated the building to the Sardar Patel Memorial Trust,of which he happened to be a trustee. The trust has shown no concern for preserving the buildings past and has mutilated the interiors with a series of wooden partitions to make a maze of rooms.
Autocratic streak
Harsh Vardhan was appointed the BJPs chief ministerial candidate in Delhi mainly at the insistence of Narendra Modi. The democratically inclined Nitin Gadkari could not bring about an agreement within the warring factions of the Delhi BJP for a common candidate. But the more autocratic and decisive Modi put his foot down and insisted that one individual had to be projected. A tough decision had to be taken even if it meant a mini-rebellion in the party.
Baith jayein
Speaker Meira Kumars favourite sentence in the Lok Sabha is baith jayein (sit down). And passengers on an Air-India flight from Varanasi to Delhi last week were not pleased that they had to sit an extra half hour in the departure lounge as the plane was held up because of Kumars late arrival. Even after passengers were allowed to board the plane,they had to wait another half an hour as AI staff tried to accommodate Kumar’s baggage since the luggage hold was closed.
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