Inside Track
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Unhealthy speculation
Rumours about the Prime Minister’s deteriorating health usually emanate from his own party. A report making the rounds is that the recent building activity at Race Course Road near the reception office is for expanding the medical facilities available for the PM in-house. Actually a new conference hall for cabinet meetings is being constructed since the space available at 7, Race Course Road is limited and can accommodate only 21 around a table.

The medical room at Race Course Road was instituted after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The most prominent machine there is a television set which keeps the doctors entertained since they are on 24-hour call in case of an emergency. Most of the medical equipment is in the well-fitted ambulance which accompanies the PM wherever he goes. The PM has a 15-minute check up by his doctors every morning. If all goes well, the PM should spend only 10 days in Mumbai recuperating after his knee operation, a day less than his holiday in Manali earlier this year.

Disloyalty test
Though he is well aware that he will lose, Congress dissident Jitendra Prasad is seriously considering breaking the party tradition and contesting against a Gandhi for the post of party president. The late Rajesh Pilot had contemplated a similar move as a symbolic gesture to see how much support he could muster. After Pilot’s death, Manmohan Singh’s name was mooted but he declined. So did Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh.

The creditable showing of Begum Noor Banoo against the official candidate in the contest for the executive of the Congress parliamentary party has heartened the rebels. The list of those whom Sonia has slighted one way or the other — Ahmed Patel, K. Karunakaran, Vijayabhaskara Reddy, Vasant Sathe and Najma Heptullah — keeps growing. After replacing the presidents of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh wings mostly with Arjun Singh’s nominees, Sonia could install yet another former Congress (T) man, Rao Birendra Singh, as Haryana party president, which would send Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Bhajan Lal smack into the dissidents camp.

Weak-kneed club
The American sitting next to the Prime Minister’s foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya at the official White House banquet was very concerned about the PM’s impending knee operation. She explained sympathetically that her husband had undergone a similar operation. On day one after the operation, the pain was agonising, she warned. On day two, it was only slightly less. But after four days, her husband Thomas Pickering, former US ambassador to India, felt like a new man. She provided her e-mail address so that one weak-kneed patient could compare notes with another.

Bowing to bureaucrats
It was a high-power media delegation which traveled with Prime Minister Vajpayee on his US tour, since most were editors of leading publications. But the Ministry of External Affairs accorded the editors less weightage than what is given to a deputy secretary, a particularly picky editor complained. The journalists were clubbed with the security guards at the rear of A-I 1. While the officials stayed in swanky hotels with an A plus category, the journalists, even though they footed their own hotel bills, were put up in much humbler quarters, far removed from the prime ministerial party. At the New York airport there were hired cars for even the junior-most bureaucrat, but the press party was bundled into a van. The final indignity was at the Zurich airport where the media was made to wait for several hours in an airport shed, while the officials drove off to their hotels during the long refuelling halt.
An official was unsympathetic to the media party’s complaints that journalists did not fall within the official protocol chart and so comparing an editor with a deputy secretary was inappropriate. If they disliked the standards provided, they didn’t have to come, was his point. Journalists were not part of the official delegation but offered the left over seats in the PM’s special aircraft.

Brass tacks pay
Earlier this year, former Congress MP Subbarami Reddy tried his hand for the first time at designing his own invitation card. His daughter-in-law warned that the result was so outrageous that people would laugh at him and no one would turn up for his party. But Reddy disproved the czars of style who prophesied his party would flop thanks to his crass style. Almost a dozen full secretaries to the government of India showed up at Reddy’s Mathura Road residence, along with the city’s glitterati. Sour souls attributed his social success to the line-up of film star guests announced in advance on the invitation itself.

Reddy personally designed a more tasteless card for his birthday bash last month in Vishakapatnam. The envelope featured Reddy with a telephone in hand, surrounded by roses. In the card, there was a picture of Reddy swathed in saffron robes with a lingam floating above him, along with various photos of swamis and politicians. A list of expected guests of honour, distinguished guests, special guests, special invitees was also provided. Without the lure of Aishwarya Rai and Karishma Kapoor, nevertheless, the birthday bash had an impressive turn-out.

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