It’s never too late to have friends in high places. At the launch of 80-year-old Ram Jethmalani’s recent book, Conscience of a Maverick, by the Prime Minister last week, his friend and client Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav pitched for a post for the venerable lawyer. Lalu showered praise on Jethmalani’s “computerised brain” and went on to add that “this brain was being underutilised”. Lalu even confessed he had asked UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi to use Jethmalani’s services in some post of responsibility. However, Lalu himself had failed to secure a Rajya Sabha seat for Jethmalani from Bihar, after protests by RJD workers over Jethmalani’s past association with the BJP. Is Sonia listening?For a global HindiIf the failed attempt at thrusting an Indian for the post of UN Secretary General, and the swinging fortunes of India’s concerted attempt at getting a permanent berth in the Security Council were not enough, New Delhi has now resurrected its demand to get Hindi recognised as an official language of the international body. So, in the run-up to the UN General Assembly in September, the government will hold the Vishwa Hindi Sammelan in New York. Held every four years, Hindi scholars and patrons are flown in for the meet. Officials are banking on the symposium to put pressure on the UN but they also admit it is a difficult deal to pull off. But who says numbers don’t count?Cross-border vacationingIt was a holiday request that took our authorities by surprise but they are not complaining. The ambassadors of two ASEAN countries, Thailand and Indonesia, and the Consul General of Singapore, all based in Dhaka, asked for permission for a short trip to the Northeast last weekend. The three Dhaka-based ASEAN diplomats visited Shillong, Cherrapunji and Guwahati, just to see how it was on this side of the fence. It was just a holiday with their spouses, said an official, but added that a bit of mixing business with pleasure would not harm New Delhi anyway.Clean and competitiveMost RJD workers in Bihar may have accepted Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s sway, but Raghuvansh Prasad Singh continues to remain unmoved. The Rural Development Minister keeps a separate file of letters written to the Bihar CM—the number has just crossed 150. His tirade against Nitish’s rule continues whenever he visits the state, and now they have spilled into his press conferences in Delhi too. But is there more than meets the eye? Perhaps Singh is positioning himself as the perfect foil to Nitish’s “clean image” and someone who can also compete with the CM’s administrative competence. More so now that Lalu is busy elsewhere lecturing Wharton undergrads.Order, orderWhen the Prime Minister spoke about the fine balance between judicial activism and judicial overreach in the wake of the recent quota crisis, his government was clear on what could constitute executive overreach. This message was subtly given to quota champion Ram Vilas Paswan at the recently held Left-UPA meeting over the quota crisis. Paswan argued the court had used the word “desirable” to arrive at a statistical basis for the OBC quota, hence it was not an order and that the government should go ahead and implement the reservations from this year. But other leaders insisted a “desire” by the Honourable SC was an “order” and it was not “desirable” for the government to overreach itself. The meeting ended with the decision to approach the court again.Tongue twistedBeing a spokesperson of national parties is indeed a thankless job, as the Congress’ Satyabrata Chaturvedi found out. After playing hide-and seek with the media on the Allahabad court’s controversial order of taking away the minority status of UP Muslims, and then refusing to give a byte when cornered, he was stumped to find out that his unforgiving “friends from the media” had landed at Sonia Gandhi’s door with a signed petition against him! The tension of UP elections seems to have had its effect on Chaturvedi’s counterpart in the saffron party as well. The otherwise suave Ravi Shankar Prasad lost his cool when journos cracked jokes about the EC’s CD-FIR against BJP chief Rajnath Singh.By George, he’s missingThe UP election campaign is in full swing, but senior JD(U) leader George Fernandes has not campaigned for his colleagues. The reason? His status is completely muddled. Fernandes is officially a Lok Sabha member of the JD(U), but he is involved with the Samata Party. If he had flirted with Mulayam Singh Yadav earlier, he has not bothered to have any tie-up between the Samata and Samajwadi Party. Worse, JD(U) leaders, bent on compounding his agony, are intent on sending him a list of constituencies shortly, asking to know if he would wish to campaign for the party nominees.Turn of interns?Will the doors of Parliament be opened to accommodate interns? The idea has come from A K Gopalan Bhavan, the CPI(M) headquarters in the Capital, after the party received several requests for internships at its offices. Party MP Sitaram Yechury apparently made the suggestion after he got requests from students of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Since then, the party has received similar requests from the National Law School of India, Bangalore and Symbiosis Institute of Business Management and have suggested the idea of interns to Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Rajya Sabha Chairman Bhairon Singh Shekhawat.TailpieceTop lawyer and party general secretary Arun Jaitley has spent days at the Election Commission pleading the party’s point of view on the controversial campaign CD, at what was clearly a great cost to his successful legal practice. However, as his adversaries have noted, the lawyer-politician has wormed his way back as a powerful party voice despite being no longer the party spokesperson, a fallout of his frosty relationship with party president Rajnath Singh. As Jaitley himself confessed to friends, “The CD case may have affected my practice but it has certainly kept alive my relevance in my own party.”
