Opinion Slow start

Look but don’t touch

CHIEF Election Commissioner Navin Chawla retires on July 30 this year and will hand over to his likely successor,S Y Qureshi,a hot potato. Chawla,during his tenure,has not been able to resolve the contentious issue of whether Election Voting Machines (EVM) are foolproof and it’s unlikely that his successor will have the luxury of burying the issue under the carpet since there is an increasing number of techies on the Internet insisting that they should be given a chance to prove that EVMs can be rigged. The EVM disbelievers are using blogs,Facebook,twitter,Orkut,etc to establish their case. In Pune,some scientists claim that they unauthorisedly got hold of an EVM and demonstrated that it is not tamper-proof.

On the directions of the Supreme Court,representatives of the Hyderabad-based NGO,Election Watch,wanted to demonstrate the weaknesses of EVMs in front of Election Commission officials. But the meeting ended abruptly when the NGOs tried to fiddle with the machine. The machine manufacturers cite the laws of intellectual property and confidentiality to disallow anyone from examining the insides of an EVM.

Nothing in writing

Janardhan Dwivedi,who has headed the Congress media cell for a year,was asked by journalists to clear the confusion since Law Minister Veerappa Moily still claims to be chairperson of the cell. Moily’s argument is that he is yet to receive a notification,dispensing with his services,from the party. Dwivedi’s point is that the Congress does not issue formal circulars in such matters,appointments being verbal. He cites the case of Satyavrath Chaturvedi,who received no formal notification when he was removed from the media cell. (Actually the ambiguity over Chaturvedi’s status was not resolved till fairly recently when he used a swear word for a UPA ally on a TV show. )

Moily was present when Dwivedi gave his explanation,but the validity of his message was diluted by the fact that Moily neither confirmed nor contradicted his claim. When Dwivedi turned to correspondents and asked whether their doubts were now set at rest,a journalist replied,“I am more confused than ever.”

Missing at his show

The Chinese ballet at the Kamani auditorium in Delhi last Sunday was part of the year-long festival to mark 60 years of Indo-Chinese diplomatic relations. The invitation was sent by the Chinese Ambassador in New Delhi,Zhang Yan,but surprisingly,the host was missing at the performance. His wife explained to the guests,who included all the senior members of the diplomatic corps,that the ambassador had to leave for China on official work. Earlier at an ICCR concert in the Capital to mark the inauguration of the festival,the Ambassador was similarly absent. Guests were intrigued by Delhi Lt Governor Tejinder Khanna’s speech before the ballet. The Lt Governor remarked that India and China shared a bond as they considered the rest of the word their brothers and sisters!

Cases weighing on Swami

The high profile cases filed against controversial godman Chandraswami by the CBI,such as the St Kitts fraud case and the Lakhubhai Pathak extortion case,have been dismissed by the courts. But more than 20 years after the cases were filed against Chandraswami in the late 1980s and early 1990s,they are still pending. The swami’s legal problems have taken their toll on his health. He was sitting unnoticed on a bench in the Patiala House court last week,looking a shadow of his former portly self. The swami who came to media attention originally because of his prominent friends among the international jetset,has lost over 30 kilos.