Clear winner
The contest within the Bharatiya Janata Party for control of the Constitution Club of India is over but its repercussions continue to trouble the ruling party. While the Lok Sabha member of Parliament, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, is going all out to exploit his victory in the closely contested election to reshape his political profile, the loser, Sanjeev Balyan, is now hitting back. The former MP from Muzaffarnagar in western Uttar Pradesh has alleged “vote chori” by his party colleague. Balyan has claimed that the votes of two MPs were already cast before they arrived to vote. He has also alleged that after the voting closed, the total votes cast were 629 but during the counting it increased to 669. Sweeping aside these charges, Rudy is busy undertaking a yatra in his home state, Bihar, to reshape his profile as a strong Rajput leader. The club elections had turned into a caste battle — Rajput versus Jat — and he is going all out to draw political mileage from it. Many in the BJP had felt that Rudy’s move to emerge as a leader of his caste would anger the party leadership. On the contrary, people close to Rudy claim that the Union home minister, Amit Shah, backed the move. Shah, the party’s master election strategist, has tasked Rudy to ensure that the Rajputs vote aggressively for the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance candidates in the upcoming assembly elections in Bihar.
Stay united
The general-secretary (organisation) of the All India Congress Committee, KC
Venugopal, urged state Congress leaders in Odisha to work unitedly to revive the party’s fortunes in the state. With factional feuds wreaking havoc, the Grand Old Party has been out of power in Odisha since 2000. During his visit to the state last week, Venugopal met the members of the political affairs committee and asked them to work together and put aside their egos. His advice to the party leaders was that they should all work unitedly to strengthen the Congress and take the ‘vote theft’ issue to the public. He tried to lift the spirits of Congress workers, stating that Congress is certain to return to power in 2029. He also tried hard to make all the factions come together under the Congress flag.
KC Venugopal
At the same time, he also sent a message to all the leaders that the incumbent party president, Bhakta Charan Das, is working in the right direction and all should support him. He urged them to support his proposal to organise a year-long padyatra. While Das’s camp was happy with this development, his detractors had to remain silent as Venugopal enjoys their respect and confidence too.
Pleasant change
It is not every day that you see humane behaviour from politicians and that too in the Kerala legislative assembly, which has witnessed unruly scenes on numerous occasions in the past. On Friday, VD Satheesan, the leader of the Opposition in Kerala, apologised to the food and civil supplies minister, GR Anil, for unparliamentary behaviour. On the previous day, Anil had claimed that during the Onam fair held at Satheesan’s assembly constituency, the latter had praised the Left government for arresting inflation. But Satheesan claimed that Anil was saying baseless things. Next day, Anil produced the video of Satheesan eulogising the state government’s efforts. Satheesan realised the gaffe and immediately apologised to Anil and also to the legislative assembly. His action was praised by everyone, including the Speaker, AN Shamseer.
Mystery deepens
An affidavit filed by Yasin Malik in the Delhi High Court narrates how he was roped into the terror funding case with a benign phone call to have coffee with the insepector-general of Srinagar on February 22, 2019. Without specifying the date, he said that the Kashmir police came to his house and took him before the senior superintendent of police, Srinagar, who informed Malik that due to some exigencies, he needed to be in the police station as a State guest. He was kept in the station house officer’s room for seven days and later served a detention order under the Public Safety Act and sent to Kot Bhalwal Jail in Jammu. He was brought to Delhi and on April 10 was arrested by the National Investigation Agency in a terror funding case.