The Hot Potato
Navjot Singh Sidhu has clearly emerged as the hot potato of the Punjab Congress as he jumps from controversy to controversy ensuring the headlines are on him and not the Chief Minister of the state. One day he resigns as the PCC chief, the next day he is giving advice to the CM (but of coursevia his Twitter handle). In true Sidhu style, without naming Charanjit Singh Channi, he advises the state of Punjab to “prevent & prepare, rather than repent & repair…” However, Congress sources claim that his latest move has not gone down well with his mentor-in-chief, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. When Rahul Gandhi took a delegation to Lakhimpur Kheri he invited the Punjab Chief Minister and not Sidhu to accompany him. Later Sidhu declared his own satyagraha and went off to meet the aggrieved farmers. This apparently was not what either of the Gandhi siblings wanted, for Sidhu has a penchant of stealing the headlines and Rahul clearly wanted Lakhimpur Kheri to be Priyanka’s karam-bhoomi, which is why he delayed his own visit there. But for now the party high command is content to juggle this hot potato because they feel that Sidhu is clearly their best campaigner to take on the BJP. What others see as a misguided missile, the Gandhis see as raw energy. The question is, can they harness it?
UP Seat Sharing Talks Begin
Has the SP-RLD seat sharing formula hit a roadblock? According to sources, Akhilesh Yadav, the Samajwadi Party leader is not keen to give the RLD more than 20 seats, while Chaudhary Jayant Singh is asking for atleast double that amount (there are roughly 77 Assembly seats in western Uttar Pradesh). Certainly, Jayant has hit a chord with the farmers of western Uttar Pradesh and the RLD seems best placed to get their vote. However, Akhilesh is a bit worried about the impact this will have on the minority voters in a region that has seen many Jat vs Muslim face-offs. The Jats and Muslims were two communities that Jayant’s grandfather, Chaudhary Charan Singh had united in his rainbow coalition of MAJGAR (Muslims, Ahirs, Jats, Gujjars and Rajputs). Akhilesh Yadav is confident that his party is the best placed to take on the incumbent Yogi government and doesn’t want to make the same mistake he did in the 2017 Assembly polls when he gave away 105 tickets to the Congress and the latter failed to convert these into winning seats. The question is, will Jayant remain with the SP or will he be wooed away by the Congress? Those who know Jayant are sure of one factor: that unlike his father, the late Ajit Singh, this young Chaudhary will not do business with the BJP.
A Clean Sweep?
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s Lakhimpur Kheri visit seems to have been just what the Congress party’s state unit needed on the eve of a crucial Assembly election. Suddenly Congress spokespersons, who made an “also ran” appearance on TV talk shows that were dominated by BJP vs Samajwadi Party leaders, found themselves at the centre of the debate. And the stories abound. While her stand-off with the Uttar Pradesh police went viral, another story is not as well known. About how Priyanka Gandhi Vadra evaded the Lucknow cops during her visit to a Dalit basti, Lavkush Nagar in Lucknow. According to a local Congress leader, she hid herself in the back of the car trunk to sneak out of her Lucknow residence so that the local police keeping an eye on her would not know of her destination. On reaching there she visited the local Valmiki temple, picked up a broom and swept the place. This was in response to a barb by UP CM Yogi Adityanath when a video of her sweeping her room at her detention centre en route to Lakhimpur Kheri went viral. At that time Yogi had said that “the public wants to make her fit for such work”.Priyanka took the opportunity to score a political point against the CM by commenting that “no work is menial, millions of women and Dalits do this everyday”.Whether the Congress is able to keep up the momentum is another matter, but Priyanka Gandhi Vadra gets a large share of the credit to ensure that the mainstream media continues its focus on Lakhimpur Kheri (and not just on SRK’s son’s arrest).
When it pays to be low profile
While Priyanka Gandhi Vadra dominated the headlines, two other leaders reached Lakhimpur Kheri. One was Jayant Chaudhary, the RLD leader, who got off his official vehicle halfway when he realised that the UP cops were stopping all politicians from visiting the area and had made a note of his car number. He tied a gamchha around the lower half of his face, cut across the backlanes and walked for nearly 14 hours to reach the aggrieved families. Another leader on ground was the TMC’s Sushmita Dev who had been an active face of any Congress agitation against the Modi government during her stint in the Congress. She used the oldest guerrilla tactic to evade the UP police by hiding in plain sight. When she and her TMC colleague Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar landed in Lucknow airport, they used their normal identity cards like a driver’s licence, and not the Member of Parliament cards, to check in. Luckily their plane landed at the same time as that of the AIML leader, the much more flamboyant Asaduddin Owaisi; and so while the local police were focusing on him, the TMC delegation managed to slip through the cordon. Sometimes it pays to be low profile.
A Chip on his shoulder
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, MoS Electronics & Information Technology & Skill Development seems to have landed in the right place. He spent his early years as asemiconductor design engineer in Silicon Valley at Intel and worked on two landmark microprocessors, 80486 (as a design engineer) and Pentium (as CPU architect). After which he came back to India to build the cellular wireless sector. Up in his office at MIETY are the photographs of the Pentium and the 80486 chips that he helped design. It’s been a while since the IT Ministry had a domain expert in place.