Investors or inverters?
At a time when the political battlelines are sharply drawn, the Uttar Pradesh Assembly normally maintains a serious profile; it is rarely known to take things in a lighter vein.
However, recently, minister of state for small and medium industries Bhagwat Sharan Gangwar brought the entire House down while replying to a question on investments in the state. The minister kept saying that Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav had recently addressed a conclave of “inverters” in Delhi to bring investment to the state.
While initially members dismissed it as a slip of the tongue, the minister kept referring investors as inverters. Finally, some members from the treasury benches asked him to correct himself after which the minister apologised and started referring to investors in Hindi as “niveshak”.
A Congress MLA remarked, “Probably after the acute power crisis in the state, the Uttar Pradesh government actually needs inverters more than investors.” A slip of the tongue, in this case, exposed the truth. Mr Yadav, however, is not amused and has asked ministers to stick to the language they are comfortable in.
Bear the heat
There is no end to the Delhi power crisis even as the AAP, the BJP and the Congress play a blame game. The AAP has been claiming that during their 49-day rule in Delhi there were neither power cuts nor any shortage of drinking water. True. AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal is absolutely right but he ruled the city when the weather was moderate and the demand for electricity was considerably low.
“In December and January the load on electricity is very low. And there is very less consumption of water. So whom is he fooling,” Delhi Congress chief spokesperson Mukesh Sharma pointed out. “It was the Congress which provided uninterrupted power and water supply in the past 15 years. Mr Kejriwal should apologise for not living up to the expectations of Delhiites. He is responsible for President’s Rule.”
Seems like Delhiites will have to bear the heat as well as put up with the tug-of-war between the netas.
No polls, please
There are rumours in local political circles that no MLA in Delhi wants to face fresh elections. While some fear they may not be able to make it again, others are worried that they will have to shell out more money to make a comeback. Only those who lost the last Assembly elections want to contest afresh.
A joke doing the rounds in local political circles is that Congress city unit president Arvinder Singh Lovely and party legislative head Haroon Yusuf themselves want their six MLAs to quit and help either the Aam Aadmi Party or the Bharatiya Janata Party to form the government.
“During the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress could not register a victory in any Assembly segment which falls under the seven parliamentary seats. That’s why they do not want a fresh election,” a local Congress leader said. Dittoo with the AAP.
Many AAP legislators fear they may not be able to win a second election. Some fear whether the party would be able to generate the funds it did during the previous elections. “The AAP was at number one position in only 10 of the 70 Assembly seats in the Lok Sabha polls. AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal knows if the BJP forms the government, he would automatically become the Leader of the Opposition, who holds the rank of a Cabinet minister. That way he will no longer have to search for new accommodation as he will be entitled to a big bungalow,” an AAP activist chided.
Whose stars will shine?
After working to dislodge Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi for almost a year now, some of the dissident legislators — led by state health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma — are seeking cosmic help.
According to insiders, when a few dissident legislators showed Mr Gogoi’s horoscope to various astrologers, most claimed that Mr Gogoi might continue to rule the state.
Now one doesn’t know if the predictions of astrologers will have any impact on the morale of the anti-Gogoi lobby within the Congress, but the ball is still in the court of Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Though not declared officially, it is said that after July 6 the anti-Gogoi camp can expect a change of luck that will overshadow Mr Gogoi’s strong horoscope.
The missing Aam Aadmi
Inspired by the huge public response to former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s public meeting to address people’s grievances, Delhi’s lieutenant-governor Najeeb Jung too ordered heads of all departments to personally meet people to redress their grievances in their respective work places from 11 am to 1 pm on all working days (except Wednesdays).
In the beginning, a majority of the officers did not even bother to reach their respective offices on time. So when the L-G made it clear that the officers have to attend to the grievances of the general public, many heads assigned the job to their deputies. But there is hardly any aam aadmi queuing up to meet them. A former city minister commented: “The thin attendance clearly shows people do not want to interact with bureaucrats as they do not take quick decisions. Instead they complicate the matter. It is high time the L-G dissolved the Assembly and went for a fresh election so that grievances of the people can be redressed.”
A mix-up of personas?
In the past three years that she has been in power in Bengal, Mamata Banerjee may have faced many embarrassments but nothing compared to what Trinamul Congress MP Tapas Pal caused through his hate speech.
Going by the melodramatic manner in which he spoke, it seems Mr Pal forgot that he was giving a speech in his constituency and not shooting for a Bengali potboiler in a Tollygunge studio. For instance, he proudly warned his opponents that they should not underestimate him because he was a big rangbaaz.
Using the language of the gutter, he repeatedly uttered the word maal — sometimes to refer to his revolver and sometimes to himself. “For argument’s sake, I accept that Mr Pal might have been swept off his feet and he mixed up his two personas — that of an actor with that of an MP. However, if these dialogues were part of a celluloid potboiler, the virulent and violent language that
Mr Pal used would have been deleted by the censor board,” Leader of the Opposition in the state Assembly Surjya Kanta Mishra said.
Quota politics
Maharashtra is due for elections before the end of this year, and the political action in the state is starting to hot up. ’Tis the season of alliances and dalliances, of scoring brownie points and tripping up rivals. Naturally, populist measures that win the netas brownie points with this or that section of the population are also being announced. One such announcement, which could have a significant bearing, has been of the government’s decision to give reservations in jobs and educations to Marathas and Muslims.
Now, folks from the upper castes are always suspected of having reservations about reservations, unless they happen to be communists (who honour the Manu Smriti when it comes to caste-based reservations). However, the upper castes are not the only ones to have reservations about Maratha and Muslim reservations.
Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of Dr B.R. Ambedkar, told a gathering recently that while he is in favour of reservations for both, the government should first define who is a Muslim.
“There is no biradari known as Muslim,” he said. He also had observations about the internal diversity within the Marathas. “Marathas possess 72 per cent of the land in the state. However, there are only 3,000 families who hold political and economic power, and control cooperative institutions and the land, while the rest are left out,” he said. Clearly, these reservations may end up producing very mixed outcomes, in more ways than one.
A tough choice
Who is less corrupt? With only a few months left for Jammu and Kashmir to go to polls, the state’s two major political parties — the National Conference and the People’s Democratic Party — have intensified their tirade against each other. Each one is trying to prove the other is more corrupt, in public. As several former bureaucrats, tainted and clean, as well as senior government officials and trade union leaders were recently admitted to the PDP fold, of whom some may even contest the upcoming elections, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, who is also the working president of the NC, took a dig at his political arch-rival by asking, “If such persons come to power, what would be the condition of the state?”
PDP president Mehbooba Mufti reacted by terming the NC the “fountainhead of corruption in J&K” and referred to a scam in the J&K Cricket Association involving its president, the chief minister’s father Dr Farooq Abdullah. She said, “It is an open and shut case and, going by the documents in the public domain, the main characters should have been in jail.” Omar took it further by asking the PDP leadership to tell the people who made J&K the No. 1 corrupt state in just three years, “you or we”? “Whether you tell them or hide, they know it very well that it was you who brought this stigma of No. 1 corrupt state to Jammu and Kashmir in your tenure,” he said. Neither side is lying. But neither is telling the truth about themselves.