RAISINA HILL (APRIL)

Amitabh Shukla

Diary from the seat of power

Raja

The opposition has tasted blood after it forced Communications and Information Technology Minister A. Raja to resign from the Union Cabinet in the wake of the 2G spectrum allocation scam.

Though Raja himself put a brave face forward saying that he resigned to avoid embarrassment to the government and maintain peace and harmony in Parliament, the issue has propped up the question as to why the delay when he was actually named in the CAG report. Now even the Supreme Court has posed inconvenient questions to the government on the delay in the scam which was of a profound magnitude. It also suggests the coalition compulsions of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who could remove Shashi Tharoor of the Congress but not Raja of the DMK from the Cabinet.

47-year old Raja, said to be the dalit face of the DMK, faced the united opposition onslaught after the Comptroller and Auditor-General indicted the Minister for not allotting the 2G spectrum in a transparent manner, causing the exchequer a loss of over Rs. 1.40 lakh crore.

Sensing blood, the opposition is now demanding setting up of a Joint Parliamentary Committee to probe the entire matter. It would be interesting to see whether the government yields to the pressure or not and whether the opposition unity is fragile or would lead to another round of bout with the government on a host of issues.

RSS versus Congress

With corruption fast becoming a major political embarrassment for the Congress, the controversial comments of former RSS chief K S Sudarshan against UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi led to fierce war of words between the Congress and BJP.

Sudarshan, who was eased out of the RSS, sought to bring in conspiracy theories against Sonia Gandhi and saw her hand in some of the incidents affecting her family.

"We strongly condemn Sudarshan's statement” Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh said adding that Gandhi's personality has been of an ideal wife, daughter-in-law and mother. "To say such things against a person who has declined to accept the Prime Minister's post is totally condemnable," he said.

Sudarshan had called Gandhi a CIA agent and accused her of plotting assassinations of her husband and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and his mother Indira Gandhi bringing the political discourse to a new low.

The BJP, however, distanced itself from Sudershan's statement, saying Gandhi was an elected representative and should be treated with respect.

Political observers see a pattern in the entire episode. They point out that Sudershan's attack on Sonia Gandhi was triggered by Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi's statement that RSS and banned outfit SIMI were both fanatical and held fundamentalist ideology.

However BJP leaders felt Sudershan had gone overboard. The RSS earlier launched a country wide sit-ins against the Congress strategy of linking it with terror in the wake of Indresh’s name cropping up in the Rajasthan ATS charge sheet regarding the Ajmer blasts.

Chief Ministers

After Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan was asked to go following the Adarsh co-operative scam in Mumbai, fingers are crossed in Congress circles as to who will be the next in line. The name of some Congress leaders is being talked about, the prominent is that of Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

She is still trying to recover from the setback of the Commonwealth Games after Organising Committee Chairman Suresh Kalmadi raised fingers at her as the Budget of the Delhi government was ten times more than that of the OC. Kalmadi, the MP from Pune, himself has been removed as the Secretary of the Congress Parliamentary Party in the wake of the scam. The house collapse in Delhi which led to 70 deaths has further compounded her woes. Some Congress leaders say that she should take moral responsibility for the episode and quit. Dikshit has been at the helm in Delhi for the last almost 12 years and several leaders say that she “has played her innings” and the party has to project someone else as its “winning face” for the 2013 Assembly elections.

Reshuffle

Clearly some vacancies have emerged in the Union Council of Ministers after the resignation of Prithviraj Chavan. He was holding charge of several ministries, including that of Science and Technology, Parliamentary Affairs, Personnel and also as a MoS in the PMO.

Telecom Minister A Raja too has gone and the portfolio given to HRD Minister Kapil Sibal temporarily. Earlier Shashi Tharoor had resigned as MoS External Affairs. None of these vacancies have been filled so far fuelling the possibility of a major reshuffle after the ongoing session of Parliament.

As Prithviraj Chavan was also an AICC General Secretary in-charge of important states like Jammu and Kashmir and Haryana, it is understood that there could be a reshuffle in the AICC Secretariat also sooner than later to make it more representative and have a better work allocation amongst the General Secretaries.

A lot of work remains to be done in the Congress Secretariat, including that of nominating the Congress Working Committee members. Political grapevine is that the Cabinet reshuffle will be done simultaneously with the reshuffle in the AICC so that there is no bitterness and somebody left out is accommodated in either of the two important places.

(7.11.2010)