Hindu nationalist Mahajan in and Uma out in Bihar campaign

Letter from Delhi: Mahajan in and Uma out in Bihar campaign

By Virendra Kapoor, Special to Gulf News
The "saffron sanyasin", Uma Bharti, known as much for her temperamental behaviour as for fire-brand oratory, was billed as the star speaker for the BJP in the on-going campaign for electing new legislatures in Bihar and Jharkhand.
Particularly in the caste-ridden polity of Bihar, the BJP leadership felt, Bharti would hold a special appeal for voters since she herself was a Lodh, a dominant intermediate caste.
But mysteriously enough just when the campaign got underway, Bharti developed chest pain and excused herself from doing the tour of duty in Bihar.
And since then wicked tongues in the party haven't stopped wagging.
For, between the official announcement of her being the chief campaigner for the BJP in Bihar and her sudden illness all that had happened was the surprise decision by the party chief, L. K. Advani, to dispatch the controversial Maharashtra BJP leader, Pramod Mahajan, to Bihar to bolster the party's campaign.
Honeymoon over
The parting of ways between the Congress party and the Telangana Rashtra Samiti is on the cards. Sooner than most people imagine. The TRS is getting impatient with the lack of progress in the formation of a separate Talangana state.
Admittedly, the poll manifesto of the Congress did promise to help create a separate Telangana state, but after coming to power the party has had second thoughts.
The recent leakage and wide publicity given to a secret Intelligence Bureau report which detailed the linkages of several TRS leaders with the Naxalite groups active in Andhra Pradesh was done at the behest of a senior Congress leader from the state.
The IB report named a couple of TRS legislators who, it said, are closely associated with the armed groups spreading mayhem in the state.
End of a career
Here is tomorrow's news today. A prominent industrialist is all set to quit the Rajya Sabha. The reason: his membership has sent a wrong message to the powers that be about his political leanings.
Indeed, he has been so keen not to cause offence to the new rulers that he hasn't been seen in public with his politician friend in a long time.
Saigal a huge draw
The legend of Kundan Lal Saigal has grown with the passage of time.
The other day the capital's favourite gathering point for bureaucrats, diplomats and visiting dons, India International Centre, scheduled a talk on Pakistan by the visiting US scholar Stephen P. Cohen of the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Also listed for the same time was a programme of musical homage to Saigal to mark his birth centenary.
Sorry to say, Cohen lost to Saigal by a huge margin. While the handful of strategic affairs analysts and retired editors heard Cohen hold forth on the current mess in Pakistan in one of the small committee rooms, fans of Saigal, who died 57 years ago, filled the auditorium to the brims with people jostling for standing room.
Pricey secrecy
Every time the top job in the country's internal and external intelligence agencies falls vacant, and there is a tussle to fill it among the handful of aspirants, charges and counter-charges against various claimants are made in anonymous letters and leaflets sent to politicians and sections of the media.
Last week, before the government finally ended the uncertainty in RAW by naming a senior Kerala cadre IPS officer as its new head, an anonymous one-page letter was in circulation making all manner of accusations against a couple of senior officers who were in the race for the top job.
There being no worthwhile audit of enormous amounts of money spent by RAW on its secret operations, the charges pertain to the misuse of funds for personal gain.
The writer is a well-known columnist