— Y.G. Chouksey

Pune

• Kanchan Chandra seems to have a surprising soft corner for Mayawati’s politics of self-glorification. Whether the statues are demolished or not at some future date is irrelevant. But there’s no doubt that she has wasted huge amounts of taxpayers’ money. This is governance at its worst that she may pay dearly for in the next assembly elections. Also, thanks to her self-perpetuation spree, the country knows better just what kind of PM she would make.

— M.K. Bajaj

Zirakpur

Tale of two ministers

• Mamata Banerjee’s “mamta” towards West Bengal and the “prasads” offered to Bihar by Lalu Prasad as are well debated. To avoid such controversies, the PM should annually rotate the Railway ministry. A cabinet member should be the Union Railway minister, and five ministers of state — from five different states — should assist him/ her. By the end of the government’s term, the PM would have had Railway ministers from almost all states, with world-class stations, new trains, coach factories, shopping malls, hospitals and colleges for the whole country, courtesy Indian Railways.

— P. Muraleedharan

Mumbai

Quota rush

• The Maharashtra government has rightly suffered the ignominy of the high court setting aside its resolution on 90 per cent quotas for SSC students in junior colleges. The move was nothing but a political ploy with an eye to the coming state elections. This mad rush to woo vernacular-medium students across the country must stop. In Maharashtra, after adhering to the Shiv Sena-MNS logic over the issue, how will the Congress-NCP combine set itself apart?

— Bellur S. Dattatri Pune

China in trouble

•The riots in China’s Xinjiang province are shocking. The number of lives lost and images of armed Uighur and Han gangs roaming, then those of the army moving in, are disturbing. China is multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and the Party has marketed it as harmonious. Twenty years after Tiananmen and close on the heels of the Tibetan uprising of last year, this must be very embarrassing for the People’s Republic.

— Fakhruddin Qasmi

Mumbai