Road to nowhere
The Vajpayee governmnet's chief contribution to poverty alleviation has been to rechristen existing rural development programmes with fancy Sanskritised Hindi names. This in itself causes no great difficulty because each linguistic region in the country translates the name, in any case, into the local language.



`Civilised' people don't talk about caste
Poor Suhel Seth (`Forgive me, for I drink rum' November 5). After `Dalits walked into an evening of The Gin Drinkers' (by Chandra Bhan Prasad, IE, November 2), he had to call his mother to ask which caste he belonged to.



The duo and the trio
The BJP could have claimed the high moral ground if it had summarily asked Harin Pathak, a Central minister, and Ashok Bhatt, a Gujarat minister, to resign when they were chargesheeted in a murder case. Instead, the party leadership made a vain bid to defend their continuance in the government.



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