Deepender Singh Hooda FDI speech churns Facebook frenzy

The Congress party was ecstatic to see the Parliament speech of Rohtak MP Deepender Singh Hooda on FDI in retail go viral on the social media, interpreting it as an endorsement of the government's policy, especially by the youth.

Hooda has uploaded his speech on his Facebook account, which has attracted nearly six lakh views and about 10,000 'likes' thus far. The YouTube video of his speech had been viewed by about 13,000 people by Tuesday.

While there was no rebuttal from the Opposition to his substantive points in favour of FDI in multi-brand retail, Leader of Opposition Sushma Swaraj had sought to take a jibe at him for claiming that Haryana farmers could even grow two-feet-long potatoes.

Obstacle Course

ALL their competitive politics apart, top BJP leaders — 16 of them including Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Murli Manohar Joshi, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Ananth Kumar — were closeted with External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid and his two deputies for a presentation on the Indo-Bangla land boundary agreement on Tuesday. The MEA has already briefed leaders of the Left parties on this issue. However, they still need to brief the Trinamool Congress which rules West Bengal, and which is likely to be the biggest obstacle.

Derailed Services

THE process of cleaning up the Railways from some not-so useful remnants of Mamata Banerjee's tenure as railway minister has begun. It is learnt that the ministry has scrapped the special committees on passenger amenities and passenger services. Mamata's close aides, artiste Suvaprasanna and TMC leader from North Bengal Joachim Buxla, headed these committees. The two had refused to step down from their posts even after the TMC's separation from UPA. Railway officials said the two committees had not been useful as they hardly met and did not tell the Railways anything that the national transporter did not already know.

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