The face-off between Pranab da and Chidambaram had started when as the home minister, Chidambaram had got a dossier made on Pranab’s son on how he liaisons for a big corporate house. Miffed at the same, Pranab da asked the ED, which is under his ministry, to rake up all the dirt against Chidambaram’s son Kartik and about all the share scams. Chidambaram is actually eyeing the prime minister’s post and knows that the biggest hurdle in his way is Pranab. The culmination of getting this hurdle out of the way was the bugging incident, which is now public, as is Pranab’s letter.

New Wikileaks cables are becoming a cause for worry for the American Embassy based in India. They are suffering because of the lack of political information and are having to depend on second or third sources for any information. Whenever the American officials are asking for time from a big leader, the leaders are wary of meeting them and are giving the excuse of being extremely busy. If the leaders do happen to come across them as parties or other occasions, they merely politely greet the officials and move on. Clearly, the US is at a lack of political information.

Beni Prasad Verma is trying to focus on UP and is working on his image makeover project in full steam. Gonda, which is also his constituency is seeing a lot of hand pumps being put (the work is being done by a PSU). Big banners, cut-outs, hoardings, posters of Verma was being put up. TV and newspapers are also printing advertisements with his mug frequently. Beni’s work is being taken care of by two extremely close people to him – RCP Singh and Sheetal Singh. When he was the information minister, RCP Singh used to be his PS. Beni’s current PS Raveesh Kumar is also said to be close to RCP. He is also close to Nitish for his caste analysis. Sheetal Singh is a part-time journalist and a businessman in Delhi is also had a great camaraderie with Joint Secretary U P Singh. Together, RCP and Sheetal in a way control Beni Prasad’s entire office dealings and have a big say in all the decisions taken by the office.

After the interesting revelations about Maya Me Sa’ab through Wikileaks, Mayawati has made the announcement that she will be giving more and more responsibilities to Satish Mishra and Shashank Shekhar. But what happened was quite the opposite. In the CM office, on the fifth floor, right next to Mayawati’s room would sit advisor Satish Mishra. His room has now been vacated in a hurry. Mishra is now spending most of him in Delhi and often seen at his Aurangzeb Road house, where Navin Patnaik once lived.

Ten Janpath and Sonia Gandhi has started to feel that somewhere down the line, her control over the government was loosening and she was also having to directly and indirectly bear the brunt of the PM and his government’s failures and bad press. So a new strategy was planned, wherein 10, Janpath loyalist Puluk Chatterjee replaced T K A Nair, who had been in the PMO for the past seven years. But the PM was not ready to let Nair go, and wanted to give him a post of a state minister and make him an advisor. On the other hand, 10, Janpath wants that he be made the governor of Rajasthan, the reason being that nowadays, Shivraj Patil has to take care of double responsibilities of Punjab as well as Rajasthan. Ten Janpath is fully aware that till such time Nair is around the prime minister, its loyalist and confidante, Puluk Chatterjee of the 1974 IAS cadre will not find it easy to do what Sonia wants regarding the PMO.

Rajiv Shukla is IPL’s new chairman and he intends to clean the tarnished image the brand has. For starters, he is busy making a directions and orders list for the IPL and the franchisees. First, only nine teams will take part in IPL. Shukla himself may be fond of Page 3 parties, but is against the necessity of having late night parties thrown by franchisees which also invited the players. He is of the opinion that such late night parties affect the performance of the players. So they can’t force the players to be a part of such dos. He is also busy making the commencing ceremony colourful and a gala one. It will be held in Chennai and Shukla wants that the ceremony should be of the same scale as the Commonwealth or Olympics. He is busy invited tenders and applications from Indian and foreign event management companies for the same. He is all out to prove that he is a master of all trades.

Politics and power were never as dangerous as now. Now just rubbing shoulders with it gives the shivers. God knows how many teeth will sink into the neck; the constantly dripping blood on the roads, a crimson sky, and the moon will be too… You will dread passing this jungle everytime. Now even the Congressmen are openly saying that the lawyer advisors to the prime minister have undid the party and that the PM is not running the government out of any political will but because of the IPC (Chidambaram) and CRPC (Kapil Sibal).

With a dirty packet tucked under his arm he walked quietly, but it wasn’t easy to escape the eyes of others, and so he was made to run and was hunted down. His integrity lay splattered in blood, the same integrity he has tucked under his arm. The Congressmen are cursing the day when Arvind Kejriwal had come to their doorstep with a simple demand. The then Central minister Prithviraj Chavan refused to give the assignment to Kejriwal’s NGO. Kejriwal had approached Chavan with a request to start the RTI through a phone and online. But Chavan turned down the proposal. Nitish, on the other hand, invited Kejriwal for the project and offered it to him. It is doing great in Bihar today, and more than that, it is Nitish’s ambitions that have got a further boost because he knows he has the support of Team Anna.

There was a time when the Congress couldn’t stop boasting about the NAC (National Advisory Committee) but now it is like an albatross around its neck. Congressmen feel that it was because of the pressure from the NAC that they had to bring the RTI Act into existence. And today the same RTI activists (such as Arvind Kejriwal) are becoming a bane for the party. Now the Congress is gearing up to attack the RTI activists and wants to bring to light the nexus between them and the corporate sector. The collection of proofs is on as to how many RTI applications have been withdrawn. The Congress is trying to sniff out some transactions that happened with the applications being withdrawn.

It is nothing new in Tamil Nadu to depict political leaders as the avatars of gods and goddesses. In February 2006, Jayalalithaa came forward on her 58th birthday as the Goddess of food, Annapurna. Sitting on a lotus like seat, Jayalalithaa had a bowl full of grains in one hand and a ladle in another. Some Hindu organisations had spoken against it back then. Before this, when poster depicting her as the Virgin Mary were pasted in the city, Christian organisations spoke up against it and the posters were removed. Karunanidhi portrayed himself as Arjun in the political battlefield and showed his son Stalin as Kirshna, who pulled his chariot. When Karunanidhi’s eldest son and a central minister Azhaigiri wasn’t content with showing himself as Shiv and Rama, he portrayed himself as Pope Benedict XVI in 2008. He faced severe criticism from all over for the same, and the posters were removed within a couple of days. But when it came to portraying Chidambaram as Lord Krishna, no one dared to talk against it and nor were the posters removed.