Opinion Once bitten,twice shy

The Organising Committee of the Commonwealth Games invited some cabinet ministers to preside at the Games awards ceremonies. But apart from Sports Minister M S Gill,most ministers excused themselves,not wanting to be linked with the controversial Games. As a result,the winners were presented medals by CWG officials and heads of various sporting associations.

Turf war

Secretaries to the Government of India are fiercely opposed to a proposal by the National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon that IFS officers should be included as joint secretaries in half-a-dozen key ministries such as commerce,petroleum,agriculture,finance,defence,energy and environment. Menon,a former foreign secretary,feels that economic diplomacy has now become an integral part of foreign policy and vice versa.

The secretaries,who are mainly from the rival IAS cadre,see this as an encroachment of their hegemony. Menon’s proposal has already been implemented in the finance ministry where Venu Rajamony,an IFS officer,has been appointed as a joint secretary.

Name Dropping

Cabinet secretary K M Chandrasekhar’s letter to all ministries,urging them not to name projects indiscriminately after former prime ministers,Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi,upset sycophants in the Congress. The cabinet secretary was acting at Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s behest and some wondered whether the PM was trying to downplay the party’s first family. In fact,it was Sonia Gandhi herself who asked Singh to send out the advisory. An RTI query on the number of government projects and institutions which bear the Gandhi name and were set up during the UPA tenure,proved embarrassing. Some of the schemes have subsequently folded up,others have been criticised for corruption. Of some 1,000 schemes and institutions named after Rajiv and Indira Gandhi,around one-third alone are in Andhra Pradesh,where the late YS Rajasekhara Reddy used the Gandhi name liberally to humour the high command,so that he could have freedom to do what he chose in the state.

PM’s choice,not party’s

The disenchantment and disbelief in Kashmir over the appointment of three relative lightweights as interlocutors for the state has put the central government on the backfoot. After the visit of the all-party delegation,it was assumed that the interlocutor would be a heavyweight with cabinet rank status. Names like Prithviraj Chavan,Digvijay Singh and Salman Khurshid made the rounds. Senior Congress leaders are keen to disassociate themselves from the appointments of the three intellectuals,Dilip Padgaonkar,Radha Kumar and M M Ansari,who were chosen by the PM. Many in the party believe that the only way to save the situation is to appoint a senior politician as the head of the team of interlocutors.

Unexpected praise

Jairam Ramesh has blocked so many projects on grounds of environmental concerns that he has become unpopular with cabinet colleagues and state chief ministers alike. Even Manmohan Singh was annoyed with Ramesh after he held up the proposal for a much- needed new airport at Navi Mumbai,which the PM had already okayed. But recently Ramesh received kudos from a most unlikely quarter. At the initiative of the Akali Dal,Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal,the Punjab assembly unanimously passed a resolution praising Ramesh for his “whole-hearted assistance to make Punjab rivers pollution free”. The Centre foots 70 per cent of the costs of river cleaning projects most of which are linked with the Sutlej.