Now that the crucial Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections are barely a few months away, Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah has started doing the rounds of temples and attending religious functions across the country to pray for success in the upcoming poll. He was at Delhi’s Chhatarpur temple during the Dussehra celebrations and also inaugurated the Durga Puja on the occasion of the golden jubilee of the Matri Temple Durga Puja in the capital. Earlier, the BJP president had offered prayers at Tali Mahadeva temple and the Srikanteshwara temple in Kozhikode when he visited the city for the BJP’s national council meeting. He was also present at a special Sharad Purnima Mahotsav at the Agroha Dhaam in Hisar. This is not the first time that Mr Shah has visited temples before an important election. He had done the same in the run-up to the Bihar Assembly polls last year but his efforts at seeking divine intervention failed to yield results as the BJP was decimated in that election. However, Mr Shah is confident the gods will be kinder this time and that the BJP will come out triumphant in Uttar Pradesh.
Ever since she was divested of the human resource development ministry and moved to the textiles ministry, Smriti Irani has been keeping a low profile. Having acquired a reputation for hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons, Ms Irani is virtually absent from the news columns these days. There are no more angry outbursts or slanging matches with mediapersons or her political opponents on Twitter, which had become her trademark. Realising that her penchant for getting into unnecessary controversies had not gone down well with BJP leadership which relegated her to the margins, Ms Irani is now focusing on her work in the hope that she will regain her old position as the party’s star. As a result, Ms Irani has been busy holding lengthy meetings with ministry officials and experts from the handicraft and handloom sectors and demanding instant results from them. The impatient minister wants them to organise events in a few days notice and cannot understand why they are unable to work at a faster pace. Little wonder then that the minister is being described as a woman in a hurry.
Before vice-president Hamid Ansari left for an official visit to Hungary and Algeria last week, the ministry of external affairs had said that cross-border terrorism would figure prominently in his talks with leaders of the two countries. This was particularly so since Mr Ansari’s tour came at a time when New Delhi and Islamabad are locked in confrontation after the Uri terror attack and the Indian Army’s surgical strikes across the LoC.
However, when Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán addressed the media in the presence of Mr Ansari at Parliament building in Budapest, there was no reference to terrorism. He did, however, make laudatory references to Jawaharlal Nehru and his role in nurturing strong ties with his country in his brief comments. Mr Ansari’s long stint in the foreign service served him well as he lost no time in focusing on the subject of terror when it was his turn to speak. While thanking Hungary for its support for India’s entry into the Nuclear Suppliers Group, he underlined that “there has been a meeting of minds between our two sides that the scourge of terrorism needs to be eliminated”.
Officials later were also quick to point out that the question of terrorism did come up in the vice-president’s discussions with leaders of both countries who agreed that terrorism is a disease.
After making several announcements over the past several years that plans were afoot to revive the defunct National Herald, the Congress finally made some progress in that direction with the appointment of senior journalist Neelabh Mishra as the newspaper’s editor. However, it will be some time before the newspaper can hit the stands. It was initially decided that the new look newspaper would be launched on November 14, Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary, with a special edition on the country’s first PM, who established the newspaper in 1938. But this appears unlikely now, as the office premises are still not ready. As a result, these plans have undergone a change. The National Herald will be launched on November 14, as planned earlier, but in the digital format. And it will be a special edition on Nehru, which the Congress feels has become necessary since the Modi government is going out of its way to undermine Nehru’s contributions to India.
