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Political Notes

	August 14, 2006

UP Elections : Sonia sounds the bugle for Congress campaign



Congress president Sonia Gandhi launched the party’s campaign for the coming Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh with a rally at Kanpur on Tuesday, August 8. Speaking of the poor track record of the non-Congress governments in the state over the last 15 years, she said they were incapable of delivering the goods. Sonia Gandhi asked the people to adopt the Gandhian technique of Do and Die for rebuilding a new Uttar Pradesh. She charged the state government with dividing society on caste and religious lines.



Sonia Gandhi said the state has become synonymous with caste and communal politics. Without naming Mulayam Singh Yadav, she said politicians were only hankering for power, and did not care for the common man.



Her son and Amethi MP, Rahul Gandhi, in an apparent reference to the state government’s decision to give unemployment dole to the jobless, said it had suddenly remembered the youth. He asked young persons to oust the casteist and communal forces.



The Kanpur rally was the first of eight rallies to be held by the Congress in the run up to the Assembly elections.



The newly formed Jan Morcha, in the meantime, has given a call for freeing Uttar Pradesh from what it called the Mulayam Raj of political brokers and fixers. The Jan Morcha and its alliance partners took out a march from Kakori, about 15 kilometres from the state capital which culminated at the Legislature building in Lucknow where the marchers led by the Jan Morcha president Raj Babbar staged a sit-in.



Another important player in Uttar Pradesh, Rashtriya Lok Dal president and Mulayam Singh’s coalition partner, Ajit Singh, is keeping his cards close to his chest on the party strategy during next year’s Assembly elections. Speaking in Lucknow on Saturday, August 12, he said the views of the party workers would be taken into account on whether to go it alone or contest the polls as part of the RLD-Samajwadi party combine.



Meanwhile, there is suspense on what shape the disproportionate assets case against another key political contender in the state, BSP chief Mayawati, is going to take. The CBI informed the Supreme Court on Monday, August 7, that it has completed the investigation of the case. The CBI counsel said that the matter is now pending with the CBI director for further directions.





Tamil Nadu MPs demand OBC quota Bill in current session



Members of Parliament belonging to the Democratic Progressive Alliance of Tamil Nadu have demanded the introduction of 27 per cent quota bill for other backward classes in institutions of higher learning in the current session of Parliament. At a meeting with the Prime Minister on Thursday, August 10, they submitted a memorandum to this effect. Along with the memorandum, they gave a copy of the letter written by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi as well as the resolution passed by the State Assembly in this regard on July 31. Karunanidhi had said in the letter that reservation for OBCs should not be diluted in any manner.



In the meantime, Railways Minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav has supported the Prime Minister’s proposal for phased implementation of new reservation regime for the OBCs.





Office of Profit Bill : President yet to take a decision



The Office of Profit Bill sent back by Parliament without making any changes to President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is still awaiting his assent. The Bill has now been with the President for about 10 days. The Congress is getting anxious about the matter; there is an apprehension that President Kalam will make a reference to the contentious issue when he addresses the nation on the eve of Independence Day today.



Unlike the Presidential Address in Parliament, the President’s Address to the Nation is not routed through the cabinet. There is talk doing the rounds that if Kalam does refer to the Bill in his speech, it would be interpreted as a sign of growing tensions between the President and the UPA Government.



The draft legislation, which exempts 56 offices including that of chairman of National Advisory Council, from attracting disqualification, was passed in May and sent for the President’s assent. However, Kalam sent it back with a message that the two Houses reconsider it. He called for a “just, fair and reasonable” criterion that is applicable to all states and union territories.







RAW to be restructured



There is to be a thorough restructuring of the organizational configuration of the country’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, RAW. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh approved the proposal for restructuring last week.



Acting on the basis of the recommendations of a group of secretaries, Dr. Singh has allowed RAW to call on the services of personnel with three years of service in various Government cadres. Officers on permanent secondment, as the new system is known, will be free to return to their parent cadres should career opportunities arise there - a major departure from past practice.



Intended to address RAW’s debilitating shortage of linguists, technical experts and area specialists, the reforms depart from the practices put in place by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986.



Just how far the proposals will go in addressing RAW’s core deficiencies remains to be seen. The Intelligence Bureau, which uses a system of permanent secondment from the Indian Police Service on which the RAW reforms are modelled, has faced growing problems in attracting officers, in part because of diminishing recruitment to the Central services as a result of cost-cutting and the increased number of States.



Underpinning the crisis in RAW is the long-standing neglect of skill acquisition. RAW’s presence in West and Central Asia, as well as in Afghanistan, has been severely restricted by the lack of officers with language skills and regional knowledge. Its deficiencies in Pakistani languages such as Pashto were brutally exposed during the Kargil war. Similar problems have beset its China and East Asia operations.





National Security Advisory Board reconstituted



The Government on Saturday, August 12, reconstituted the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) with former Foreign Secretary M. K. Rasgotra named convener for a second term.



Other members of the NSAB are the Editor of The Hindu N. Ravi; former bureaucrats K. S. Rao and V. K. Jain; Institute of Defence Studies and Analysis Director N. S. Sisodia (also a former bureaucrat); scientist Roddham Narasimha; former Army Chief V. N. Sharma; former Indian Air Force chief S. Krishnaswamy; former naval officer P. S. Das; former Atomic Energy Commission Chairman M. R. Srinivasan; former intelligence officers S. P. Talukdar and A. S. Dulat; academicians Rakesh Datta, N. Balakrishnan and Alka Acharya; former foreign service officials K. V. Rajan and V. K. Grover; political analyst Wasbir Hussain; and Director Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations, Rajiv Kumar.



The NSAB will now have 19 members instead of 15 as in the past. Barring the Convener, the Government has dropped all members of the previous NSAB.