Everyone knows about Mulayam’s love for Etawah. His loving son Akhilesh Singh is a Parliamentarian from Kannuaj. When the problems of the potato farmers from the area reached Netaji, he was upset and was worried that their crop can’t reach the mandis. There are no takers for potatoes. A lot of times, the crop goes bad just sitting in the fields. Netaji asked an expert Rajiv Tandon to prepare a proposal on potatoes. The topic was: How to bring relief to the potato growers. The proposal was ready and Tandon brought it to Netaji, who asked to add Etawah to it. Later Netaji decided that if a potato processing unit was to be set, it will be in Etawah. Which means the farmers of Kannauj will continue to suffer.

How would poor Kirit Somaiya have known that the National Rural Health Mission’s funds pilfering, which had been looking into keenly and going into records thoroughly, will have the same Babu Singh Kushwaha into the party? It is believed that Somaiya had a big role to play in getting RTI papers against Kushwaha and making them available. Now Somaiya doesn’t know how he will ever face the party president.

Sources have revealed that BJP’s election budget for UP is nearly Rs 250 crore.

The moot question is: Did Rajnath Singh’s son Pankaj Singh go to meet UP’s strongman Dhananjay Singh? And in any case, Gadkari had sent a five-men team to UP to meet Dhananjay in prison. The team was led by Gadkari’s special aide Arun Narendranath.

Babu Singh Kushwaha, Dadan Mishra, Sakshi Maharaj, Badshah Singh, Rajiv Mishra, Dhananjay Singh, Chatrapal Singh are the names of some tainted politicians who have joined the BJP. The entry to such politicians in the party makes fun of the BJP’s character. And the most surprising thing about this is the Sangh’s silence about all this. Now people from other parties are poking fun at it and asking BJP leaders, “So, when is Gadkari ji getting Kalmadi and Raja to join his party?”

Once the right hand man of Behenji, ever since Babu Singh Kushwaha has embraced saffron politics, there has been a storm of sorts in the BJP. The party was banking on cashing in on the Anna effect in the UP elections but its hopes have been dashed. Within the party, questions are being raised on the loyalty of Gadkari and Rajnath and the party is openly calling it the “5-25 ka chakkar”. Talking about cleanliness and transparency in politics, the Sangh has been quiet through it all, which has left several surprised. In hushed tones, the saffron ranks have been talking whether the Sangh Parivar may be the beneficiaries of the 5-25. When a worried Advani called up Gadkari asking how he could even think of taking Kushwaha in the party, Gadkari remarked, “If we hadn’t taken him, the BSP and Congress were ready to take him in for a long time.” Gadkari is sure that getting Kushwaha within the party will bring votes from the schedules castes and whoever has joined hands with Gadkari is a bonus.

At last, a threat by veteran Congress leader Narayan Dutt Tiwari bore fruit and the Congress high command will have to take him a little bit more seriously, and several close aides of Tiwari have been given the ticket. Upset at being ignored, Tiwari ji had announced that he would ask all non-party contestants to fight elections from all 70 Assembly seats. Clearly, if Tiwari ji would have done that, the advantage would have gone to the BJP. So by way of acquiescing him, tickets were given to his nephew Manish Tiwari from Nainital, Harendra Sharma from Sahaspur, and his son-in-law Navprabhat from Vikas Nagar. In the last elections, too, Navprabhat had contested from Vikas Nagar of Dehradun on a Congress ticket and the BJP had given him a stiff fight there.

When the matter came to the government, a Cabinet meeting was underway. After the meeting, five people stayed back to talk about the matter – the prime minister, Chidambaram, Pranab Mukherjee, A K Anthony and Salman Khurshid. Pranab was of the opinion that it is no use complicating the matter further, and so he should be asked to retire in 2012 itself. To which the PM said that if he retires in 2012, a Sikh will become the army chief, and people will point fingers at him. To which Chidambaram said that in that case, the next person in the line should succeed the post. To which the PM said that the next person is a Marathi and the move will incite anger against him among the Sikh community that he helped J J Singh but not a Jat Sikh. These top five leaders could not come to a collective decision and as a result, the matter is still waiting in the wings.

First an application was presented by the army chief’s wife, which was then sent to the Legislative Committee of the army, from where it was sent to the government for a hearing. V K Singh belongs to Bhiwani in Haryana, and his father Thakur Vijay Pal Singh is one of the close aides of former Prime Minister Chandrashekhar and was elected from the Sohna Assembly area in 1977. He also joined the Congress in 1980 and his family has close ties with Capt Amrinder Singh.

Army Chief V K Singh’s birth certificate is in the news yet again. When he joined the NDA in 1965, he was younger than the admission criteria according to his 1951 birthdate, because of which his father probably got it changed to 1950 on paper. He raised the question of his age himself. Singh was born in the army hospital when his father was in Pune there and the birth certificate is from there. When he raised the question of his birth date, the government agreed that the date would be at 1950 and he too had agreed to it. When he was made the army chief, the government assumed that he would retire on May 31, 2012. Now the problem is that if he retires in 2012, the next army chief would be Bikram Singh, who is a Jat Singh. And if his birth date is taken at 1951, he will retire in 2013, and his post will be taken by Lieutenant General K T Parnaik, Northern Army Commander Maharashtra.