The Prime Minister conducted the meeting of the Council of Ministers last week rather like a schoolmaster addressing a classroom of errant schoolboys. Singh asked each one for a report of his or her ministry’s performance and to what extent the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) had been implemented. He started with the junior-most ministers of state without independent charge, most of whom have been excluded from key work in their ministries by their seniors and had therefore little to say. One of the few who passed with flying colours was the MoS for Law who spoke on and on. After half an hour the senior ministers were restless. Laloo Prasad Yadav expressed openly, what many thought privately, that it was time to wind up and call ‘‘Madame’’ for dinner. Sonia Gandhi was waiting in the next room since the UPA chief cannot attend Cabinet meetings. Some Cabinet ministers are annoyed with PMO officials trying to assess their performance on the basis of superficial queries about the CMP. They are also unhappy with the PM speaking directly to their secretaries, as this is not the convention. Injury to minor Last week, Delhi afternoon paper Today carried as its lead story the news that Priyanka Gandhi’s son Rehan had to be rushed to hospital after a branch of a tree fell on him. Priyanka, who is very protective of her children, got Law Minister H R Bhardwaj’s son Arun Bhardwaj to send a legal notice to the paper. The notice did not deny the facts of the story but challenged the news value of the report and said there was no justification for publication. It was an infringement of the rights of privacy of a minor child. The notice warned of suitable action if the paper continued to publish photographs of Rehan in future. It would be held responsible for any damage or any injury caused as a result of such unwarranted exposure. Territorial encroachment Manmohan Singh is keen that his government faithfully implement the National Common Minimum Programme (CMP). In fact the PMO has issued a circular fixing the responsibility for implementing each of the 188 items in the CMP on different ministries. The PMO was understandably miffed when the Statistics and Programme Implementation Ministry headed by Oscar Fernandes tried to muscle in on its territory and last month issued a circular on the same lines as the PMO, except that in many cases it fixed dual and triple responsibility of ministries for implementing the actionable items. This led to a stiff note from the PMO to all ministries basically making it clear that Fernandes’s ministry should mind its own business and not duplicate efforts. Maha-Bharat(i) over MP There is no love lost between Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Babulal Gaur and Uma Bharati ever since the former made it plain that he would brook no interference from his predecessor, who should stick to national politics. Yet ironically, Bharati’s temper tantrums may have actually earned Gaur a temporary reprieve. The BJP high command was thinking of replacing Gaur with BJP general secretary Shivraj Singh Chauhan; Gaud’s lacklustre personality has no mass appeal and the party wanted the more dynamic Chauhan, also an OBC to boot, installed instead. But then Bharati emerged to stake her claim. It seems there was a communication gap, for Bharati was under the impression that if the Hubli case against her was withdrawn, she would be restored as CM. In the circumstances, the BJP can ill-afford to change its leadership in the state without ruffling many feathers. The tussle over the MP chief ministership was projected as a quarrel over party posts, but that was not the real issue. As a sop Bharati has been made a member of the ‘coordination committee’ specially set up to coordinate relations between the Madhya Pradesh government and the BJP. Consultative delay Unlike most other consultative committees of MPs which were constituted immediately after the last session of Parliament, the consultative committee for the Civil Aviation Ministry was formed only last month. The delay is perhaps because of Rahul Gandhi. Rahul indicated his preference for this committee long back, but Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad hesitated, wanting to first get clearance from Sonia Gandhi, in case she had other plans for her son.
