Will Antony come to Tharoor’s aid? (Capital Buzz)

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NEW DELHI - Many in the Congress party are wondering if Defence Minister and senior Congress leader A.K. Antony will once more bat for his beleaguered colleague from Kerala, Shashi Tharoor.

Antony may have a major say in any decision on Tharoor’s continuation as minister of state for external affairs in the wake of the Kochi IPL franchise controversy. After all, they say, it was he who strongly supported Tharoor’s candidature from the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency last year.

The sources say Congress president Sonia Gandhi relies heavily on Antony in matters of Kerala and his views will influence the party’s course of action to wriggle out of the unsavory IPL happenings.

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Speaking in many tongues!

Nirmala Sitharaman is the first woman spokesperson of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from southern India and a polyglot at that. And her inclusion comes at a time when the party is planning to expand its base in the southern states.

Sitharaman, who has made a mark since she was appointed BJP spokesperson about a month back, is fluent in Tamil, Telugu, English and Hindi. She can understand Malayalam and Kannada.

The new spokesperson, whose cogency may have been sharpened by debates during her days at Jawaharlal Nehru University, has already become the party’s face for regional news channels from southern India.

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Will BJP kill bill?

Congress president Sonia Gandhi has told a women’s delegation that in her reckoning it is not Lalu Prasad or Mulayam Singh Yadav who would play spoilsport for the women’s reservation bill, but the BJP.

The delegation had gone to inquire from her about the chances of passage of the bill in the Lok Sabha. Sonia Gandhi said the BJP was playing a double game and instead of supporting the bill wholeheartedly to which it was committed, it chose to run with the hare and hunt with the hound for best political mileage.

Added to that was the personal rivalry between Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley and Leader of Oppositon in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj, with the latter resenting that Jaitley had stolen a march with his spirited defence of the bill when the Rajya Sabha passed it amid unprecedented acrimony and chaos last month.

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Power and pitfalls of speech

Minister Shashi Tharoor is known to be an eloquent and fluent speaker. But for once that may have worked against him as he tried to clear the air in the Lok Sabha over the Kochi IPL controversy.

Tharoor had made an elaborate defence of his case. However, the opposition was in no mood to let the controversy die down quickly and wanted to raise the issue in the presence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

A parliament wag says that the opposition deliberately stalled Tharoor’s speech, lest the articulate minister hog the limelight by convincingly repudiating allegations against him.

Tharoor was left to read his statement to mediapersons outside parliament.

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Media lessons for Gadkari

BJP president Nitin Gadkari has shown a marked preference for the moderate style of party icon Atal Bihari Vajpayee rather than the shrill Hindutva of L.K. Advani. And now has also fallen back on the former prime minister’s former media adviser.

Ashok Tandon, who is director of the Makhanlal Chaturvedi National University of Journalism and Communication, has said he cannot leave his present job to join Gadkari’s team but agreed to advise him pro bono.

After all, the Nagpur politician is a complete stranger and rank political outsider for the national media.

Gadkari recently showed he had much to learn on media management as he left a clutch of editors belonging to the Editors’ Guild of India muttering under their breath after he failed to arrive for an appointed interaction and informed them of his inability just 10 minutes before it was to begin.

The reason: his helicopter had failed to take off from Haridwar where he gone for a Kumbh dip and he had not reckoned with such an eventuality untill it was too late.

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Nitish Kumar talk show

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who advised union Home Minister P. Chidambarm not to speak too much on the government’s fight against Maoists, however, chose not to be economical with words himself last week.

At his press conference at the Indian Women’s Press Corps, Kumar spoke for almost two hours going into great details when asked about the Maoist threat, food security bill, women’s reservation bill and ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

As he went on and on, a few cameramen ran out of their stock of tapes. Print journalists too gave up taking notes, prompting a bored scribe to remark that the press conference had turned into a discussion.

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Silence is golden

After his initial outburst at Home Minister P. Chidambaram over the anti-Maoist strategy, Rajya Sabha MP Mani Shankar Aiyar may have suddenly realised that silence is golden.

Amid heat in parliament over the Dantewada massacre, some TV journalists accosted Aiyar, hoping for some juicy comments from the unflappable Congress leader. Apparently under directions from the national leadership to raise all contentious issues only in the party’s internal fora, Aiyar kept smiling till he reached the gate of Parliament House.

Then he opened his mouth to say: “Main kya janoon (What do I know)?” - and slipped away.

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Azad’s silver lining

Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad is known to digress from the prepared text of his speeches, and last week he did so again, this time offering a silver lining - quite literally!

At the awards ceremony for best performing states in the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) last week, he said he had specially ordered the prize trophies to be made of silver and the winners should carry them along.

“These are pure silver, don’t throw away, take then home,” he said. As Azad made his interjection about pure silver, even Vice President Hamid Ansari, who was the chief guest of the event, couldn’t stop smiling.

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Sunny side up

Imagine somebody being more at ease in open environs than in the comforts of his air-conditioned office in Delhi’s sweltering heat. Meet Chaudhri Mahaveer Singh, the chief gardener of the Supreme Court horticulture department.

Entrusted with the task of spreading greenery all over the court premises, Singh and his colleagues have a huge air-conditioned room, complete with sofas and other furniture in their office.

But they are more likely to be found working in the lawns or tending to the flower beds. And when they are not working, just relaxing beneath the trees. They swear they are more comfortable closer to nature - even at a searing 43.9 degrees Celsius.

“We get sick in the AC. The sun is all right for us,” explains Singh humbly.