Nursing old slights?

JUDGING by Hamid Karzai’s muted, slightly acerbic, responses to Indian businessmen’s queries during his visit to Delhi last week, the head of the interim government at Afghanistan does not seem as euphoric about Indo-Afghanistan ties as some of his ministerial colleagues who have deep-rooted links with India.

True, Karzai has an MA in political science from Shimla University, but he nurses a grievance that he was not allowed to continue his studies further because somebody in the ministry of external affairs decided that he could not stay on in India.

UP’s woman power

ALTHOUGH the number of women MLAs elected to the UP assembly is small, they wield clout far in excess of their numerical strength. The BSP’s Mayawati is, of course, UP’s shining example of women’s empowerment. Once Kanshi Ram was Pygmalion for this former primary school teacher, but now Galatea has left her mentor far behind. Mayawati led the very successful BSP campaign in UP, while the party’s founder Kanshi Ram was relegated to Punjab, from where not a single BSP MLA was elected.

Mayawati apart, three first-term women MLAs are also likely to play an active role in the state’s politics. Louise Fernandes, wife of Congress leader Salman Khurshid won the Farrukhabad assembly seat.

The gutsy and outspoken Louise avenged her own and her husband’s earlier defeats from the same region during the parliamentary elections when the Samajwadi Party had launched an unscrupulous poster campaign spreading all kinds of canards.

Anuradha Chaudhary, the general secretary of the Rashtriya Lok Dal and a rising star in Ajit Singh’s RLD, has also been elected despite Om Prakash Chautala’s efforts to sabotage RLD’s chances. The BJP’s Ameeta Modi wrested the Amethi seat, part of the Gandhi family’s fiefdom, thanks to her work as a zilla parishad chairperson and her husband Sanjay Singh’s clout with the Thakur community.

However, Kalyan Singh’s good friend — Kusum Rai — for whose sake Kalyan lost his chief ministership, had her wings clipped. She lost from two constituencies and suffered the ignominy of forfeiting her deposit.

Role reversals

IF Orissa governor M.M. Rajendran behaves more like a chief minister than just the ceremonial head of the state, it is perhaps because chief minister Naveen Patnaik adopts the more laidback style of a governor. Rajendran, a retired officer from the Tamil Nadu cadre, takes a keen interest in the day-to-day administration; visiting police stations, district headquarters and recommending transfers of slack officers.

In one month alone half a dozen secretaries were changed at his behest. In Delhi, Rajendran makes it a point to call on not just the PM and the president but other central ministers to discuss state projects.

The state’s bureaucrats and politicians maybe unhappy that the governor’s office is usurping their functions, but one person who does not feel threatened is the chief minister himself.

The Jat set

THE friendly fights between the BJP and its NDA allies in the UP assembly poll have led to new acrimony within the alliance. Three stalwarts who fielded candidates independent of the NDA — Ram Vilas Paswan, Om Prakash Chautala and Maneka Gandhi — ended up with egg on their faces.

They did not win a single seat but cut into the BJP vote share and in some 50 assembly seats the margin of defeat was less than 3,000 votes. The only silver lining is that Chautala’s attempts to poach into the UP Jatland may have actually helped consolidate Ajit Singh’s hold among his biradari. Chautala now knows that Jats in UP are not the same as those in Haryana.

Ajit Singh, who won 14 of the 37 seats he contested, had a higher success ratio than that of the BJP. If the BJP decides to eventually support Mayawati, Ajit will demand his pound of flesh.

Kamzor kadi

IN the waiting game between the BJP, BSP and SP to discover kamzor kadi kaun, both BJP and SP are assisted by friends in the media who are busy putting out reports that Mayawati’s flock of 98 MLAs is the most vulnerable to poachers.

The BJP is careful to keep on the right side of the media — the majority of whom are in any case from the upper castes — which is why the media generally projects a rosier picture of the BJP’s electoral chances in UP than its actual performance. The BJP’s generosity to journalists was outdone by Mulayam Singh Yadav as chief minister.

A list of Mulayam Singh’s largesse to scribes was published by a subsequent regime to the embarrassment of the concerned journalists. Mayawati, who once chased journalists out of her Delhi home with a slipper, has undoubtedly the worst press relations of the three.

But the feisty lady does have a few admirers in the media, nevertheless. A bold Doordarshan correspondent put out a report suggesting that it was not Mayawati but the NDA contingent which was most vulnerable to floor crossing, particularly Ajit Singh’s 14 MLAs. This has greatly embarrassed the government-run TV channel, which has already been under flak for putting an unfavourable exit poll for the BJP, though it subsequently turned out to be pretty accurate.

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