Opinion Royal salute

Losing patience

AFTER spending over 120 days in jail,Kanimozhi is understandably reaching the end of her patience. She lost her cool at her lawyer in the CBI court at one point and protested loudly,“I want bail. How long can I be separated from my

son Aditya?’’

Her mother,who was in court,reported her condition to father M Karunanidhi who shot off a letter to Sonia Gandhi and also issued a press release. Karunanidhi noted that it was against the principles of natural justice to deny a person bail. The letter contained a veiled threat. Already the DMK is fighting the forthcoming civic polls in the state without the Congress.

De-linking from 2G

KANIMOZHI had calculated she would be out of jail by the beginning of October,but her hopes seem to be belied.

Although the CBI has framed charges,the magistrate,O P Sahni,is still to make a chargesheet since fresh evidence keeps getting introduced by one or other of the accused and it looks as if all the accused will be chargesheeted together. While Kanimozhi is way down in the list of accused,the main accused A Raja has not even bothered to apply for bail. Raja remains in a feisty mood and says he is willing to spend another year in jail so long as people finally comprehend that he has brought about a revolution in the telecommunication sector and committed no crime. Raja takes inspiration from Fidel Castro whose book on revolution he is reading. Raja,a lawyer,argues his own case. Another book he is reading avidly

is Ram Chandra Guha’s India after Gandhi.

Aware that if Kanimozhi is clubbed with the other 2G accused then she will have to wait for long to be chargesheeted,Karunanidhi has written to Sonia Gandhi to point out that his daughter is not arrested in connection with the 2G Spectrum,unlike the others. She is accused only in connection with the “borrowings and repayments of Kalaignar TV.’’

Costly survey

RAHUL Gandhi’s aerial survey of the earthquake in Sikkim upset the West Bengal authorities since some four to five choppers were tied up by Gandhi and his SPG team for the whole day. Later,the helicopters flew from Sikkim to Meghalaya so that Gandhi could attend a youth Congress meet there. The state government required the choppers urgently to ferry Bengali patients from remote areas to Kolkata.

Caught in middle

L K ADVANI is caught between two stools. On the one hand,his family has been egging him on to claim the slot of prime ministerial candidate of his party,which they feel is his just due. On the other hand,the RSS wants a clear message to go out for the 2014 elections—that the prime ministerial candidate has to be from a younger generation. Significantly,Advani’s statement from Nagpur did not clearly rule himself out as a prime ministerial aspirant,he merely hinted he was not in the reckoning. Advani knows he needs the RSS’s backing if his new yatra on corruption is to be successful. He hastily changed the venue of the yatra’s starting point from Gujarat to Bihar

because he was warned that Narendra Modi was unlikely to support a potential rival. Unfortunately for Advani,Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is also unenthusiastic about Advani’s programme since it evokes unhappy memories of the Ram Mandir Yatra of 1990.