Eye on the prize

The Bharatiya Janata Party, under the prime minister, Narendra Modi, has its eye on the prize. With the 2024 Lok Sabha polls in mind, it wants to focus on women as a potential vote bank. The party leadership feels that most of the welfare schemes of the government benefit women directly, giving it an opportunity to woo large sections of women irrespective of region, caste and community.

The elevation of Droupadi Murmu to the post of the president will be used to attract both tribal people and women. Thus when the party recently announced candidates for the upcoming Tripura assembly polls, one of the candidates was the Union minister, Pratima Bhoumik, a Lok Sabha member from the state. Whispers in party corridors have it that the leadership plans to make her the chief minister if it returns to power. All this is aimed at strengthening the party’s pitch to win over women voters. Amidst buzz about a cabinet reshuffle by the PM, this strategy is being used to predict that the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, and the women and child development minister, Smriti Irani, face no threat.

Prescribed tune

Cinema halls in Delhi have started playing both the Hindi version and the multilingual one of the Election Commission jingle titled “Main Bharat Hoon” to promote the idea of taking pride in voting. It has been produced by Subhash Ghai and features 18 celebrity singers who offered their services pro bono. The EC only bore the production cost. The multilingual version has lyrics in 12 languages, much like the legendary “Mile sur mera tumhara”. Six months in the making, several actors, including R. Madhavan and Pankaj Tripathi, also appear in the music videos. Madhavan recorded his piece in Spain and Tripathi from a forest where he was shooting for a film. The Chief Election Commissioner, Rajiv Kumar, spent hours vetting every frame. A source from the EC said that the brief to Ghai was to include only ‘non-political’ celebrities.

Changed tack

KS Eshwarappa meant business when he had insisted a while ago that the Karnataka CM, Basavaraj Bommai, reinstate him in the cabinet. Forced to quit over corruption allegations, he has since been cleared by a police probe. Eshwarappa was among a slew of BJP lawmakers who wanted to be in the cabinet while the state goes into poll mode. But the national leadership turned down the demand. With no other option left, Eshwarappa has decided to ‘work for the party’ and declared that he does not want to be a minister in the interim. Sources say that the prominent leader is eyeing the top post and wants to be seen more on the poll turf and be counted as a changemaker if the party wins.

Debt repaid

The Union railway minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, has made multiple efforts to please the people of Odisha ahead of the next general elections. With this in mind, he has made an attempt to pay back the people of the state since he was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha in 2019 on a BJP ticket with the support of the ruling Biju Janata Dal. He had also served as a district collector in Cuttack and Balasore during his career as an IAS officer. “Odisha has got a lot of importance. Odisha had demanded Rs 8,400 crore but Prime Minister Narendra Modiji allocated Rs 10,012 crore for Odisha in the financial year 2023-24,” Vaishnaw said about the allocation for the development of railways in the state. The allocation was Rs 1,600 core more than the government’s expectation. This is the highest-ever allocation for the state. He also announced that 57 railway stations would be modernised in the state.

Mixed signals

The outburst of the Bihar CM, Nitish Kumar, against the BJP saying that he would prefer death to joining hands with the saffron party has set the alarm bells ringing. Politicians from different parties recalled that Nitish had taken a similarly harsh stance in 2014-16 after breaking up with the saffron party, only to join hands with it again in 2017. “Nitish is like Chanakya in modern Indian politics. If he says something that also means its opposite could be in his mind. You see friends go through phases of love and anger,” said a senior politician who has known the Bihar CM for five decades. Other leaders pointed out that Nitish’s emphasis on a separate railway budget could be a signal of some shift because if he was so serious about putting up a fight against the PM, he would think of getting this shift done when another government takes charge at the Centre. The next budget will just be a stop-gap arrangement in the light of the Lok Sabha polls later in 2024. Already there is speculation on whether Nitish wants the railway berth for himself or somebody else.

Footnote

The Congress veteran, AK Antony, is known for his spells of silence, even when he is faced with crucial issues. With his son, Anil Antony, quitting the Congress following a row over the latter backing the BJP argument about the BBC documentary, Antony senior has once again gone into silent mode. Although he had decided last year not to be part of electoral politics anymore, Antony senior has always been the go-to man for a section of the Congress in Kerala because of his access to the Gandhi family. Antony’s loyalists now fear that he might become a recluse thanks to his son’s anti-Congress stand.