The Brahmin leadership of the BJP is out to cut to size the party's powerful OBC lobby. First, Uma Bharati was completely marginalised in the HRD ministry by Murli Manohar Joshi, her senior minister. Then Gangacharan Rajput, a close confidante of UP Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, was served a notice for highlighting the fertilizer shortage and threatened with another notice for protesting against the haste in pushing the women's bill. Now the long-standing move to remove Kalyan Singh as Chief Minister of UP has been revived.

The proposal is to induct Singh as a Central Cabinet minister. The only hitch is that the BJP high command is divided over whether to appoint UP Assembly speaker Kesrinath Tripathi or Murli Manohar Joshi in Singh's place.Singh's rivals in UP are crowing over their victory, oblivious that they are cutting the very branch on which they are perched. The BJP's victories in the parliamentary poll in north India were substantially due to the support it received fromnon-Yadav OBC voters such as Lodhs, Kurmis and Nishads.

During the Lok Sabha elections, it is its OBC vote bank which won the BJP a majority of the seats in the belt from Bulandshahr to Hamirpur in UP. Some 60 to 70 BJP MPs are OBCs. In the recent Madhya Pradesh assembly poll, the OBC-dominated Bundelkhand region gave the BJP 18 out of the 24 assembly seats in contrast to the party's indifferent performance in the rest of the state.

Club class

The pretext for installing a jumbo-sized advisory board for the National Security Council is that it can be truly representative of the country. But in fact some 90 per cent of the 27 members most of whom are nonentities in the field of defence studies and strategic analysis are Delhi-based. At least two thirds are members of the India International Centre (IIC), Delhi's intellectual hub for under-employed bureaucrats, journalists, diplomats and politicians. An almost equal number are also members of the exclusive club within the club the Saturday Club,which meets at the IIC once a week over lunch to debate the weighty affairs of the nation and serves as a pressure group to influence government policy.

Incidentally, Pai Panandikar, one of the moving figures behind the Saturday Club, also founded the Centre for Policy Research, which has been funded by several US foundations. There is a sneaking feeling that most of the so-called experts on the advisory board have a common world view. And why has the National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, who has included so many of his fellow club members, pointedly excluded N.N. Jha, who apart from possessing the requisite club membership is a retired diplomat and, more importantly, convenor of the BJP's Foreign Policy cell?

Short-sighted policy

Usually Sonia Gandhi goes by the advice of former Finance Minister Manmohan Singh on economic issues. Which is why the Congress party first assured the BJP that it would pass the Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA) Bill in the current session. But the other schoolof thought which prevailed this time argued that the Congress should not help the Vajpayee government establish its pro-reform credentials and the longer the delay in passing the IRA Bill the more the dissensions in the BJP on the issue. The Congress's belated protest that it needed to refer the IRA bill to a parliamentary committee because there are certain objectionable clauses surfaced only on Monday, though the proposed Bill had been in circulation for four days.

Party leaders, who do not want the Congress to help the government pass either the IRA or the Women's Reservation bills this session, argue that the Vajpayee government will in any case collapse by the Budget session and the subsequent government can take the credit for the two measures. The successor to the Vajpayee government is envisaged as a short-term interim arrangement backed by the Congress a possible choice for Prime Ministerial candidate being H.D. Deve Gowda. If an exception is made in the case of the Patents Bill, it will bebecause our exporters will face international trade sanctions if the Bill is not passed by April.

The problem with such game plans is that there is nothing more uncertain than politics, carefully planned strategies can backfire. More than the the Congress's short-term interests, the country's economic future is at stake.

Lame-duck government

These days nobody seems to be taking orders from the `lame-duck' government, including the Cabinet Secretary, Prabhat Kumar. After the retirement age was extended to 60, the policy was that no exception would be made for granting further extensions. But M.B. Lal, Chairman of the Cotton Corporation of India who was due to retire on November 1, has bucked the system.

While the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) turned down the plea for his extension, the Cabinet Secretary did not convey its decision to the Textile Ministry, which unilaterally granted him an extension.