Ashok Gehlot fails booth test
Amid a blame-game over the Congress’ rout in Rajasthan where it lost all 25 Lok Sabha seats, what has made it worse for Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot is the party’s performance on his home turf Jodhpur. He had fielded his son Vaibhav in Jodhpur and campaigned extensively for him, even holding dinners for different caste groups, but the scion lost by a huge margin of over 2.6 lakh votes. Worse still, the Congress did miserably in Gehlot’s own booth in Sardarpura, his assembly constituency, with the BJP getting 605 votes against the Congress’s 266.
The Congress fared much better in Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot’s booth in Kishanpol, with the party getting 624 votes as against the BJP’s 87. These booth-level figures are being used by Gehlot’s detractors to impress upon the party high command how unpopular the chief minister has become barely five months after coming to power. Last December, Gehlot managed to get a third term as CM though it was Pilot, the state Congress chief, who had shifted base from Delhi to Jaipur to keep the party active and in an agitation mode during its five years in the opposition.
When Swamy spoke of corruption in front of Sibal
It was a rare sight to have Congressman Kapil Sibal, BJP leader Subramanian Swamy and CPM leader Sitaram Yechury together on one stage at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Delhi Wednesday evening. The hour-long discussion on the Lok Sabha elections was full of candid and fun moments. Swamy jocularly told Sibal that he would not talk about corruption as the lawyer-politician might take it personally because he is counsel for many “crooks” in the Congress party. In a riposte, Sibal said, “I am counsel for many crooks in your party, too.”
There was another light moment about Union minister Piyush Goyal’s prediction in November 2018 — at an award function of a media group — about the BJP getting 297-303 seats. The party got exactly 303. “How did he manage to do that?” Sibal wondered to which Swamy responded it was a fluke. Sibal said there was more to it than just a fluke. “Well, he has a bad habit of going to an astrologer,” Swamy quipped.
Siddaramaiah almost takes the ‘CM seat’
The recent clamour of Siddaramaiah supporters asking him to be made chief minister again seems to have rubbed off on the leader too. On Wednesday, Siddaramaiah almost took the seat of the CM again — but in a car.
After a meeting with AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal in Bengaluru, Siddaramaiah who seemed to have forgotten that he is a ‘former’ CM headed straight to the chief minister’s car. In a split second, he realised his mistake and changed his path. Supporters of Siddaramaiah and Kumaraswamy did not realise the mistake, or else one might have seen a rebellion breaking out. And at this point, both the Congress and JDS would have found it difficult to quell it.
(Contributors: D.K. Singh, Snehesh Alex Philip and Rohini Swamy)
Also read: Congress MLA’s Rs 1.5-cr Mercedes ‘gift’ is not a first for Siddaramaiah