Opinion Laughing stock

Powar sharing

Praful Patel may have lost the high profile civil aviation ministry,but he is determined to make a mark in the less newsy heavy industry portfolio. For a start,the NCP minister wants to take up the question of why the government still pays the employees salaries in 30 heavy industry PSUs. Patel organised a get-together last week for women correspondents at which the only other party member present was Sharad Pawar’s daughter,Supriya Sule. Patel and Sule are united in the belief that the NCP’s future lies with the Congress,unlike Sule’s cousin Ajit Pawar in Maharashtra who wants to take a more confrontationist position towards its ally in the state.

Out of sync

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and BJP leader L K Advani have something in common. Of late,both have been out of step with their party members on key issues. Advani’s apology to Sonia Gandhi on S Gurumurthy’s ‘black money report’ has not gone down well with his party colleagues,including BJP president Nitin Gadkari. The BJP feels Advani unnecessarily provided an opportunity for the Congress to score a point. Advani’s letter was drafted by his personal staff and family and senior party leaders were not consulted until after the letter had been dispatched. Ironically,the BJP was not even associated with the black money report,it was Advani who gave it prominence by presiding over the report’s formal release. In the case of Singh,several Congress MPs complain privately that the PMO does not always take the party high command into confidence before interacting with the media and the Opposition. Singh’s recent press conference with TV editors and his explanation for agreeing to constitute a JPC after holding out the whole of the winter session,evoked some criticism.

Pretension and practice

Elite universities from the UK and the US bend their admission rules to accommodate the offsprings of political leaders all over the world. Dictators are as keen as elected heads of government to get an Ivy League stamp for their offsprings. Libyan President Muammar al-Gaddafi’s son and heir Seif al-Islam al-Gaddafi’s M.Phil thesis for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2007 has now come to the notice for the incongruity of the topic. His paper is on the ‘Role of Civil Societies in the democratisation of global governance institutions: The move from soft power to collective decision making in government.’ Considering the Gaddafis are ruthlessly exterminating all signs of protest against Libya’s first family,Seif’s politically correct thesis was clearly not written by him.

Last minute excisions

A reference in the draft of the President’s joint address to Parliament on Telangana was dropped as was a specific mention to the CWG scandal. The Cabinet felt that the inclusions would unnecessarily create controversies. But the omission of Telangana only further irritated MPs from the region,who cutting across party lines created a commotion in Parliament while Vice President Hamid Ansari tried to deliver the President’s address in English.

Over-crowded branches

If parliamentarian P C Chacko is appointed head of the JPC on the 2G Spectrum scam,it will be one more name in the long list of politicians and officials from Kerala who hold key positions in the UPA government. In fact,peeved non-Malayalis who feel left out from positions of influence are busy adlibbing Akbar Allahabadi’s famous poem that laments the ruin of the garden because of the ulloos (owls) on every branch—by substituting the prefix ‘ull’ with ‘mal’,making it mallus.