Opinion No place for CM

Three women

The BJP leadership has a tough choice. Three women are in the fray for a Rajya Sabha nomination from Gujarat. Actress Smriti Irani is supported by party treasurer Piyush Goel and president Nitin Gadkari. However,Irani ruffled Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s feathers some time back by a stray remark on Gujarat. Opposition leader Sushma Swaraj is also reportedly unhappy with the party president grooming a junior rival who is cast in a similar mould to herself,as an inspiring example of a Bharatiya nari. Party spokesperson Nirmala Sitharaman is generally well-liked and has become an understudy to Arun Jaitley in drafting resolutions and was seen chatting with Modi at the recent BJP Lucknow executive meet. Former deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha Najma Heptullah is backed by LK Advani. It is argued that fielding a Muslim woman might counter Modi’s anti-minority image. Heptullah’s disadvantage is that she has already completed five terms in the Upper House,although for most of this period she was a Congress MP.

In the Congress,there is no doubt as to who gets the party’s sole RS nomination from Gujarat. Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmed Patel coyly suggested that he should step down as has had four terms in the Upper House,but Gandhi dismissed his offer.

Unsporting coverage

There have been unkind reports in the media,fed by disgruntled MEA officials,that Minister for External Affairs S M Krishna flew to London last week for the Wimbledon matches and met British Foreign Secretary William Hague only as an afterthought. Krishna was so rattled by the negative publicity on television that he even paid his own hotel bill at the Bentley in London so that nobody could point a finger. Actually,Krishna had no reason to be so defensive. Hague had personally invited him to London to watch Wimbledon when the two met in Rome at a conference. The PMO had cleared Krishna’s trip. Much of the MEA’s ire at Krishna is directed at his powerful OSD,former businessman Raghavendra Shastry,who is considered an outsider by the South Block mandarins. Incidentally,Shashi Tharoor’s former OSD,Jacob Joseph,who has reportedly fallen out with his former boss,was quick to tweet reports criticising Shastry.

Backward step for miners

MPs at the Parliamentary Standing Committee for the Coal Ministry expressed shock and dismay at the conduct of the commissioner in charge of the Coal Mines Provident Fund Organisation (CMPFO),A N Bhattacharjee,who took the retrogressive step of winding up the much hailed Project NIDI scheme for coal mine pensioners. Inaugurated in August 2006,NIDI was a scheme for fully computerising the office of the CMPFO. The system ran successfully and uninterrupted for two years providing numerous benefits to the miners,eliminating third party intervention and drastically reduced the time in which miners could access their PF and pension information. It brought transparency to a PF and pension fund with a corpus of some Rs 40,000 crore. But in April 2007,Bhattacharjee took charge and stopped all payments to the technology partner in charge of computerisation without giving any reason. Finally,in December 2009,the technology partner was forced to withdraw its support services since it had not been paid its dues for 18 months,amounting to Rs 4 crore. The CMPFO has since returned to the manual system.

Ostrich-like attitude

Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar will take her own time to rule on the faxed resignations sent by nine Congress MPs from Telangana. She will first meet the MPs individually to find out if they had been coerced or intimidated into giving their resignations. The resignations by Congress MPs are the outcome of frustration against the Delhi high command’s inaction even as people pressure mounts in the region on the demand for Telangana. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee lost his cool with the resigning MPs in a private talk and warned them they would have to fend for themselves as the party would put up other candidates in a by-election. The Congress still hopes it can stave off a crisis by offering a Telangana regional council instead of a separate state.