Vis-a-Vis

AMARINDER SINGH Punjab chief minister versus PARKASH SINGH BADAL Shiromani Akali Dal leader

"We have a crook and a corrupt man who has skimmed the state and its economy dry."

"There's no parallel to him. He registered cases against me, my son, my wife and on all Akali leaders from village to minister levels."

EPILOGUE: With the elections now over, we'll soon know what the voters have to say.


VOICES

"My party will be the one ruling in 2015. Uma Bharati may be a peon there, but somebody from Janshakti will be the prime minister."

Uma Bharati, Bharatiya Janshakti Party chief

"When the NDA was in power, we did much more than any government in the past 50 years for the welfare of Muslims. But the Congress Government is talking about Muslims only."

Sushma Swaraj, BJP leader

"Terrorism is there in Kashmir, in Assam. Why are they trying to raise a bogey of terrorism in Punjab? Talking about terrorism during election is only with an eye on votes."

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, former prime minister

"It is a matter of shame that private tuition exists in India only at the primary level of education."

Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate and economist

"Many guys in the team realise that it is their last shot at the World Cup. These players in particular would be keen to stand up and be counted."

Rahul Dravid, captain, Indian cricket team

THE BUZZ OF THE WEEK

Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee is said to be eyeing the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The Congress wouldn't mind a candidate with Left-of-Centre leanings, but does not want the new President to be a card-holding Communist.

ISSUED:

RESIGNED: Shashi Tharoor, UN under-secretary general for public information, from his post.

ISSUED: By the Supreme Court, notice to ex-chartered accountant R.S. Lodha on the Birlas' petition, challenging the refusal of their right to object to Priyamvada Birla's purported 1999 will, by which she left her Rs 5,000 crore estate to him.

AWARDED: To Oriya poet Dr Jagannath Prasad Dash, the Saraswati Samman 2006 by the K.K. Birla Foundation for Parikrama, a compilation of his poems on life and death.

PICTURE SPEAK

OUT-OF-THE-BOX: Moily

For good measure, he has also suggested the abolition of the Rs 2 crore mplads funds, introduced by Narasimha Rao. He further recommends that President and governors be armed to disqualify legislators who change allegiance mid-course. Some recommendations are certainly out of the box but it would require a courageous government to implement them.

Already struggling with the Judges' Inquiry Bill, the UPA is now faced with the recommendation by its own commission to set up a National Judicial Council. The council would consist of a collegium with representatives from executive, judiciary and legislature and would have the final say in appointment, removal and transfer of judges. At present, the Supreme Court does all this on its own.

Moily suggests that suitable amendments be made in the Constitution to do away with the requirement of prior sanction to prosecute corrupt civil servants. In cases of disproportionate assets, permission for prosecution should be done away with.

It is ironic that the civil servants recently moved the Government to allow accused colleagues to hold on to their assets till the case is settled. Moily has to present 13 reports in all, the fate of the previous three is not known and the "radicalism" of the fourth one assures us about where it would end up.

-By Neeraj Mishra

PICTURE SPEAK

GIVE AND TAKE: Baba Gurmit Ram Rahim Singh

In an unexpected turn of events, Baba Gurmit Ram Rahim Singh, Dera Sacha Sauda's chief, a religious sect based at Sirsa in Haryana and having a large following in Punjab, has issued an edict in favour of the Congress-an unprecedented move seen as a quid pro quo with the Congress-led Government at the Centre assuring to bail out the sect's spiritual head from an ongoing CBI inquiry.

The Sacha Sauda Dera has been facing the heat on charges of exploitation of women at the Dera. Some top Dera functionaries have already been booked for their involvement in the murder of a Sirsa journalist who had exposed the alleged scandal. The Congress, faced with a tough election, reportedly struck a pre-election deal with the Dera in lieu of its support.

Not surprisingly, the Dera's eleventh hour directive to its followers-estimated at seven lakh in Punjab-came as a shot in the arm for the Congress, leaving the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)-BJP combine jittery considering that the Dera's sway in the crucial Malwa region. The alliance first tried a damage-control exercise with senior BJP leaders Arun Jaitely and Navjot Sidhu dashing to the Dera headquarters.

But, finding the Dera adamant in backing the Congress, the Akali struck back by putting proxy advertisements in newspapers on behalf of Baba and his functionaries two days before the polls to create confusion among the Dera followers. Clearly, the politics of religion has come to haunt Punjab, particularly its ardent practitioner, the sad.

-By Ramesh Vinayak

PICTURE SPEAK

Tyagi

China's alarming January 11 shooting down of a satellite means Tyagi has found an unlikely ally in ISRO chief G. Madhavan Nair, who called China's ASAT test a matter of great concern. In an interview to Headlines Today, Nair backed the need for the aerospace command but distanced ISRO from it. "It needs to be under the control of the armed forces," he said. "There are no known countermeasures against ASAT weapons and providing an effective shield will be prohibitively expensive. We will need more satellites in space to avoid redundancy," he added. This is why the GSLV, which places satellites in the higher geosynchronous orbit out of the reach of ASAT weapons, has become crucial for the agency.

-By Sandeep Unnithan

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