CEC, not thanedar

Recently, the DMK lodged a complaint with the Election Commission, which seemed rather trivial. The DMK’s grouse was that the AIADMK wa...

Recently, the DMK lodged a complaint with the Election Commission, which seemed rather trivial. The DMK’s grouse was that the AIADMK was denuding trees by plucking twigs and using them as decoration for its political rallies since the AIADMK’s symbol is a twig with two leaves. Chief Election Commissioner T S Krishnamurthy promptly passed an order that the AIADMK should not use real life symbols but rely on sketches and posters for campaign purposes. Earlier, the CEC had decreed that all billboards of Vajpayee along the highway should be covered with cloth, even though the hoardings were put up long before elections were declared.

Krishnamurthy’s two colleagues in the commission, N Gopalaswamy and B B Tandon, reportedly have misgivings over the CEC converting his role into that of an overzealous thanedar. For instance, Krishnamurthy insisted that the Cochin Port Trust stop selection of tenders for projects worth Rs 200 crore though the tenders had been called for much earlier and the projects were getting delayed. An EC order decreeing that anyone travelling by air with over Rs 10 lakhs in cash should be questioned was unnecessary considering that an existing order passed by the Revenue Department in 1982 already decrees that any passenger carrying more than Rs five lakhs in currency notes on a domestic flight can be asked for an explanation.

Of Krishnamurthy’s fellow election commissioners, Gopalaswamy is the more outspoken. Tandon prefers to keep a low profile. Perhaps he feels that this is the best policy if he wants to get the CEC’s post when Krishnamurthy retires next year.

Family’s fixture

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Satish Sharma is not a member of any key Congress committee. He is seldom seen at the party office at Akbar Road and is a back-bencher in Parliament who rarely opens his mouth. All the same, Sharma probably has more clout than any of the party’s more visible general secretaries and spokespersons. His influence stems from his closeness to the Gandhi family. In fact, he is the only one of Rajiv Gandhi’s inner circle, which once included Arun Singh, Arun Nehru and Amitabh Bachchan, who is still on good terms with 10 Janpath.

Though he did little to nurse his Rai Bareilly constituency, Sharma has been nominated as party candidate from the next door constituency of Sultanpur. Sanjay Singh who crossed over to the Congress and was hoping to get the parliamentary ticket from Sultanpur has his nose out of joint. Singh, who belongs to the Amethi royal family, and had defeated Sharma in Amethi in an earlier parliamentary poll knows that he has far more clout in his family’s former kingdom than Sharma, who’s considered an outsider. To appease Singh, the Congress has held out the carrot of a Rajya Sabha seat.

Engineering social change

The fight for OBC quota reservation was spearheaded by politicians from UP and Bihar, but judging by the results of the entrance examination for the IAS and allied services the biggest beneficiaries of this quota are OBCs from Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Since 1997, when the OBC quota came into effect, the number of successful candidates from UP and Bihar has in fact fallen. A significant gain is that the percentage of successful Muslim candidates, including women, has also increased in the last few years thanks to the OBC quota. With a change in the method of evaluation adopted by the UPSC, engineering graduates do not now totally dominate. It has been ensured that humanities students are also represented.

Debtor’s memory loss

The National Films Development Corporation (NFDC) owes around Rs 83 crores to Doordarshan. The curious part is that while DD lists NFDC as its top defaulter, NFDC has for some years forgotten to mention the arrears it owes to DD in its annual statement of accounts. In fact, this year the Additional I&B Secretary, who is also the financial adviser, refused to sign NFDC’s balance statement since it did not include the amount outstanding to DD.

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Early this year, DD CEO K S Sarma wrote to the I&B Secretary urging the ministry to resolve the deadlock over non-payment. The problem is that if the ministry brings the finance ministry into the picture, NFDC could be declared a sick unit and closed down. If the I&B ministry is reluctant to take such a drastic action it is perhaps because NFDC has generated much goodwill by helpfully providing transport and making arrangements for accommodation for ministry officials visiting Mumbai.

He too has ambitions

The difference between the Congress and the SP is not really a dispute over their respective share of parliamentary seats in an alliance in UP. The obstacle is Congress negotiators’ automatic assumption that Sonia Gandhi is the natural leader of any anti-BJP alliance at the Centre. The Congress has yet to come to terms with the fact that regional leaders like Mayawati and Mulayam Singh Yadav also have prime ministerial aspirations. Mulayam made clear his ambitions two years back when journalist Kalyani Shankar interviewed him for her book Gods of Power. ‘‘Why do you lump me with leaders like Jayalalithaa, Balasaheb Thackeray and Mayawati? You must put me with Narasimha Rao and Chandrashekhar,’’ he instructed the author.