No plans to reply

Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Brajesh Mishra wrote a letter in January asking all central ministers to declare the assets and income of themselves and their close relatives. He followed up with a reminder. Ministers from Bihar have taken offence at what they consider the tone of the reminder letter and say it is not for the secretary to the PM to ask for such details. Significantly, most ministers from the state, including Ram Vilas Paswan and Sharad Yadav, are yet to provide the desired information.

Settling scores

Jayalalitha is not going to forget past slights and she was conscious that many of those present at her swearing-in ceremony as chief minister had actively conspired against her. Senior officials in the Tamil Nadu government were pointedly seated in the last row and as one official conceded ruefully in private, ‘‘Mahishasuramardini has come over us, we are trounced.’’ Officials like V. Laxmirattan, P.V. Rajaraman, V. Balraj, K. Janardhan and R. Rajagopalan, for instance, have all at some stage played a part in helping to prosecute her.

They now fear retribution.

Seated in the front row were Jayalalitha’s TMC allies, including S.R. Balasubramaniam, who as minister of personnel at the time when the CBI began investigations against her, as well as Jayanti Natarajan and Peter Alphonse, who were her bitterest critics. Jayalalitha gave them short shrift and did not even step down from the dais to greet the ailing TMC leader G.K. Moopanar sitting in the front row. Now that she has a majority on her own, Jayalalitha made clear she has no use for the TMC.

Unsocial road hogs

It is curious that it is mostly the MPs affiliated with various offshoots of the former Socialist Party who are competing with each other for driving the snazziest vehicles to Parliament. Some of the shiny new limousines in the parliament house parking lot cost around half a crore. Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party has a custom fitted Lexus with computer cum TV screens on the passenger seats, while D.P. Yadav, formerly of the SJP has an equally flashy car with computerised steering. Anwar ul Haq of the RJD, Pappu Yadav an RJD man turned independent, all flaunt vehicles which monopolise parking space in which two to three Maruti size cars could be fitted. In fact, the parliament house secretariat has decided that from the next parliament session the cars used by parliamentary correspondents will have to be parked near India Gate since there is no longer enough space for them in the parliament house compound thanks to the parking hogs favoured by aaj ka MPs.

Different perspectives

Former PIO Ram Mohan Rao was hired by Doordarshan four months back as a consultant on Kashmir affairs on the understanding that he would pinpoint for the TV channel important news developments concerning Kashmir. Rao, however, seems more interested in discussing non-Kashmir related events at news conferences and plugging only Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, under whom he served as an adviser. This is upsetting the government’s chief negotiator on Kashmir K.C. Pant who feels DD is ignoring his role. Some days back when Pant met G.M. Shah’s son despite a fax sent to DD the news was not carried in the night bulletin. It was only after the PIO N.J. Krishna telephoned DD to protest that the news was finally carried the next day.

Governing principle

I goofed up badly last week in assuming that Tamil Nadu governor Fatima Beevi, a former Supreme Court judge, would refuse to swear in Jayalalitha. In fact the governor installed Jayalalitha in office in record time. Jayalalitha met Beevi at 11.30 a.m. on May 14. By 2 p.m. the governor had sent the formal letter inviting her to be chief minister. At 6.17 p.m., the same day, Jayalalitha took the oath of office. The new chief minister did not even wait for a group photograph with her new ministers but drove immediately 15 kilometres away to the secretariat at Fort St George where she had to sign the file appointing her private secretary Ramakrishnan. The haste was to ensure that the oath taking and signing her first official file was completed before 7.30 p.m. when the inauspicious ashtami period began.

In politics interpretation of the law, as with statistics, can always be juggled around to suit the powers that be. Still apart from the obvious political compulsions, Beevi, who was appointed a governor by Deve Gowda and moved to Tamil Nadu at the behest of former central minister C.M. Ibrahim, would not have wanted to take the responsibility for the outburst of violence and spate of suicides which would no doubt have erupted if Jayalalitha was denied chief ministership.

Pilgrims progress

Convinced that his party is not doing enough for Hinduism, Gujarat Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel has come up with a novel idea. Since the government subsidises Haj pilgrims, he has decided to subsidise pilgrims to Mansarover. In future, the Gujarat government will foot Rs 20,000 of the Rs 50,000 cost of the Kailas-Mansarover trip and also provide free trekking outfits.

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