Eating humble pie

Humiliation has finally forced Mayavati to eat humble pie. Putting behind all the pre-poll talk of a sarvajan samaj, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh has once again gone back to her good old Dalit support base and the original blueprint for a bahujan samaj. The Dalits are bristling with grievances. Even though they have voted for their beloved behenji, the spoils of power were all claimed by the upper castes. And anyway, the Congress was getting too close to the Dalits for behenji’s comfort. In politics, one change leads to another. Little wonder then that Satish Mishra, the leading architect of Mayavati’s rainbow coalition or the Dalit-Brahmin bhaichara, has been pushed to the backseat. While Mishra’s stars may be on the decline, Feroze Varun Gandhi, whose hate speech in Pilibhit is being held responsible by some for the electoral debacle of the Bharatiya Janata Party, is resolute to ascend the ranks. Varun wants to be made the UP party chief, no less. He and his mother have summarily dismissed the accusation that the speech, vilifying the minority community, had cost the BJP dearly in UP. Mother and son have pooh-poohed any such suggestion — Muslims, goes their logic, don’t vote for the BJP anyway. Now it’s all up to the sangh parivar to lobby for young Varun. Change, no doubt, is in the air. Who knows if these tremors will eventually turn into seismic shifts?

Old habits die hard

Staying with the theme of change. Jyotiraditya Scindia was quick to act on the Congress high command’s stern injunction to do away with honorific titles used by members of royal families. In Guna, his home constituency, Scindia was busy asking his supporters not to address him as ‘Maharaja’ or ‘Shrimant’. Local scribes have got the same instruction, while the word has also reached Gwalior where party leaders have been asked not to print any title before his name on posters, banners and billboards. Still, there are a few slips of tongue every now and then. Old habits indeed die hard.

Maternity with marriage

Shivraj Singh Chauhan is an unhappy man. At a mass wedding ceremony in Madhya Pradesh, sponsored by his government, at least 14 brides turned out to be pregnant. Ironically, neither the husbands nor the in-laws seemed terribly bothered under the circumstances. It is not that the conservative MP society has turned over a new leaf all of a sudden. (Many of the newly-weds were tempted by the promise of an extra 5,000 bucks.) As luck would have it, one of the girls went into labour minutes before the exchange of garlands was to take place. As her agonized cries reached a feverish pitch, the authorities were forced to halt the occasion.

Launched by Chauhan a few days ago, Madhya Pradesh has already witnessed some 89,418 kanya daans, earning the chief minister the sobriquet, ‘mama’, or maternal uncle. But this latest development has left him hurt and angry. For someone known for his strong views against the abolition of Section 377, this was simply too much to take.

Get, set, and go

Nine press conferences by Union ministers on a single day must have set some sort of a record in Raisina Hill. The journos had a torrid time rushing from Jairam Ramesh to Kapil Sibal to G.K. Vasan to Prithviraj Chauhan to Ghulam Nabi Azad to S.M. Krishna to Murli Deora to P. Chidambaram to Vayalar Ravi. The ministers put their lungpower on full throttle to spell out their schemes for the first 100 days. Given the media blitz, many were surprised to note the absence of media-savvy ministers like Kamal Nath and Salman Khurshid. Did they stay away because they have nothing to say? Or is it because they consider the 100-day-target as some sort of an imaginary marathon unworthy of a contest?

Safety in numbers

While the vaunted 100-day mark remains the talk of the town, P. Chidambaram has already started turning his words to deeds. Under him, the home ministry is working out some drastic measures, though these did not exactly meet the approval of some of his ministerial colleagues. There has been talk of cutting down the number of security guards allotted to each minister instead of having a round-the-clock system that requires at least three personnel to attend to every minister. Although the home ministry has assured that the threat perception of individual ministers would be taken into account, a section of the junior ministers feels that a reduction in the number of security guards would downgrade their social and political standing.

FOOTNOTE

A tweet a day keeps trouble away

Politicians may still continue to live in the realm of the unreachable, but take heart, Shashi Tharoor is here. And where there is Tharoor, Twitter cannot be far behind. Ever since the minister of state for foreign affairs took office, he has been religiously updating his page on the social networking site, telling his followers every day whom he had met and to discuss what. Although no other minister has shown any inclination to follow his example, Tharoor has refused to stop his daily ‘tweets’. He keeps tweeting — to respond to criticism from within the Congress or to counter wrong ideas about some foreign affair. Recently, he had countered the impression that the attacks on Indian students in Australia were racist in nature. Then again, just the other day, he denied the all-familiar accusation that he never listens to his partymen. If only the latter would start tweeting their grievances instead of whispering among themselves!