Inside Track Pricey Presidential Perks

Last month’s marathon four-and-a-half hour meeting between Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his Cabinet ministers and secretaries concerned at the Seva Teerth was not merely an assessment of the performance of the different ministries; it was also an unspoken test of the endurance and physical fitness of Modi’s ministers. One minister who failed the test by dozing off — though not quite as conspicuously as US President Donald Trump who has often been captured on camera snoozing at meetings in the Oval Office of late — had to be nudged awake by a senior secretary.

The day after the West Bengal election results, Mamata Banerjee found her world turned upside down. During the night, all photographs of Banerjee in Kolkata were removed and posters of Suvendu Adhikari pasted in their place. She learnt that many of her trusted legislators were planning to switch to the BJP. Though isolated and vilified, Banerjee retains her fighting spirit and feels that at this juncture, Delhi would be a better option than remaining in Bengal. She is looking for a safe Lok Sabha seat. (A Rajya Sabha ticket is not an option since even if a TMC MP steps down for her, a by-election would automatically favour the BJP.) The initial speculation was that cricketer Yusuf Pathan might vacate his Baharampur Lok Sabha seat to make way for didi but Pathan has turned rebel. Now Banerjee has zeroed in on the Basirhat Lok Sabha constituency where a by-election is due and the voter breakdown favours the TMC. No stranger to struggle, the feisty Banerjee has fought singlehandedly in the past to carve her political legacy. Between 1999 and 2001, she was the lone TMC member in the Lok Sabha. Old-time parliamentary scribes recall that she once angrily threw a paper, which she claimed was a flawed voter list, at the acting Speaker. Ironically, she charged that the voter list was replete with infiltrators from Bangladesh, while in the recent Bengal poll, she took the diametrically opposite stance against the BJP on the same issue.

The string of ministers from both the Centre and states who visited temples last Wednesday to offer prayers for Prime Minister Modi in appreciation of his remarkable feat as the longest serving Indian Prime Minister was in response to phone calls from the party head office. So that their presence would not go unnoticed, many alerted TV channels in advance. While applauding Modi’s achievements, some RSS seniors cautioned against the BJP aping former Congress president D K Barooah who had famously deified Indira Gandhi with his “India is Indira” remark. While the RSS does not normally intervene in political decisions, it has reservations about a potential tie-up between the BJP and the DMK, a party which has never hidden its anti Sanatan sentiments.

Those who expected an instantaneous mobilisation of youth support for the Cockroach Janata Party at Janatar Mantar, on the lines of the overnight success of Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal’s campaign against corruption in Manmohan Singh’s government in 2011, forget that Kejriwal’s initial crowd support was partly provided by RSS cadres and activists camped there for several days. Even phenomenal social media numbers take time and effort to translate into feet on the ground.