Coded message

In an apparently coded message, the dissident Aam Aadmi Party member of Parliament, Swati Maliwal, tweeted a painting depicting the disrobing of Draupadi in the Mahabharata. Maliwal turned against the AAP after she was allegedly assaulted by an aide of the party leader, Arvind Kejriwal. The painting shows Lord Krishna providing a magical garment to cover Draupadi as Dussasana attempts to disrobe her. During the polls, Maliwal highlighted civic failures and attacked Atishi’s parents for opposing the execution of the Parliament attack convict, Afzal Guru. One wonders what she means.

Still charismatic

The Rashtriya Janata Dal president, Lalu Prasad, may be a bit infirm due to illnesses and advancing age, but he is no less charismatic. He said recently, “Lalu Yadav kisi ke saamne kabhi jhuka nahi hai, aur kabhi jhukayega nahi. Lalu Yadav jo kehta hai, wahi karta hai.” The dialogue was met with heavy applause from the audience, rivalling that in cinema halls. When the RJD chief added that they should not also bow down before anyone, it was met with more clapping and sloganeering. Well-known for his rustic charm, Prasad asserted that the time has come to unite and form a government at the Centre as well as make Tejashwi Yadav the chief minister of Bihar. He participated in a public function after a long time and ended his speech by imploring everybody to stand together to protect the country. The crowd expressed its support by shouting his name while the youngsters played dialogues and songs from the film, Pushpa. Prasad left the venue grinning.

Staunch loyalists

Even though the AAP was handed a drubbing in the Delhi polls, the party has a few supporters who remain loyal to it. The wife of a polling booth officer in charge of the party in Arvind Kejriwal’s New Delhi seat called up the candidate’s office to complain that her husband was secretly working for the Bharatiya Janata Party. The AAP has accused BJP’s Parvesh Verma of bribing voters here. At a cluster of paan shops and eateries on Rafi Marg near Parliament, one shopkeeper refused an offer of Rs 5,000 from unknown men on polling day. He had already decided whom to vote for, he said, and his vote was not for sale.

Divided house

The Congress’s Chandni Chowk candidate, Mudit Agarwal, accused the party’s New Delhi nominee, Sandeep Dikshit, of tacitly backing the AAP candidate, Punardeep Sawhney, the son of now AAP and earlier Congress member, Parlad Sawhney, by trying to get the Congress evicted from its campaign office in Chandni Chowk. The Congress has not won an assembly or parliamentary seat in Delhi since 2015.

At odds

The Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi, visited Patna earlier this week to meet his allies, Lalu Prasad and Tejashwi Yadav. But while Prasad went away to Nalanda to participate in the memorial function of a former politician, his younger son took a flight to Delhi. The Congress top brass in Bihar understood that they had performed the vanishing trick to avoid Rahul.

Sources say that the two RJD leaders were annoyed because Rahul has been trashing the caste survey done by the Bihar government. However, the RJD was a part of the government when it was conducted and Yadav has often been taking credit for it in public and pointing out that the reservation for backward classes, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes was increased from 50% to 65% on its basis. While the Congress leaders tried to clarify that the remarks were taken out of context, Rahul did it again by asserting that a caste census was the need of the hour, and not on the lines of Bihar but like the one conducted in Telangana. Many senior RJD leaders pointed out that the alliance will vanish if the Congress leader kept speaking against the caste census.

Ideal candidate

Will he, won’t he? Bihar is agog with speculation about whether Nishant Kumar, the son of the Bihar CM, Nitish Kumar, will join politics. Several party leaders have proposed Nishant Kumar’s entry, despite his seeming disinterest to carry on the political legacy of his father. The call has been growing in the face of suspicion that the CM is suffering from dementia. Some senior Janata Dal (United) leaders asserted that someone was needed to keep the party and the non-Yadav backward and extremely backward vote bank intact and the 49-year-old computer science graduate from BIT Mesra fits the bill. They also pointed out how other top leaders from Bihar have inducted their sons into politics. Close aides of the CM pointed out that he has long been a staunch opponent of dynastic politics and would not make the same mistake to become a laughing stock. Though neither has said anything about the son joining the JD(U), the rumour mills are relentless.