Side Track: Jaswant defeated by the 'system'

Upon moving from external affairs to finance ministry, Jaswant Singh was keen to clean up the mess left behind by his predecessor.

Yashwant Sinha, who moved into Singh's place in the ministry of external affairs (MEA), had appointed quite a few joint secretaries in finance ministry. Singh, on becoming finance minister, wanted to replace them with officers of known merit and basic grounding in economic theory.

To begin with, three joint secretaries were earmarked for transfer out of finance ministry. Nearly three months later, not one has moved out.

The reason: Singh did not reckon with entrenched vested interests. It seems the backers of the joint secretaries who, in the first place, had succeeded in getting them these slots had again pulled strings to stall their transfers. The result is the 'unwanted' joint secretaries rule!

Monkeys and ministers have always lived together in peaceful co-existence. True till the advent of Jaswant Singh as the minister for external affairs. Singh found these simians a menace and after a good deal of cogitation a 'langurwala' was hired for a princely sum of Rs5,000 per month to ensure that not one of these hairy apes got anywhere near the MEA offices. Soon the MEA was rid of monkeys.

Sensing the presence of their tormentor in MEA, quite a few monkeys had learnt to stay within the confines of the North Block. However, a great misfortune hit them when Singh moved from MEA to finance ministry. Now, even as the old 'langurwala' still retains his contract with the MEA, his area of operations has been extended to the finance ministry as well.

The habits, meanwhile, of the 'langur' and his master, a rather perceptive officer noted was interesting.

Whenever the animal grabbed a 'banana' from an unsuspecting colleague or was given one by a generous government official, he invariably handed over the fruit to his master while it settled to eat the peel, in the fashion of the corrupt bureaucrats who get to pocket small change while their ministerial bosses walk away with the bulk of the loot!

One of the more well-known journalists, Swapan Dasgupta was miffed at what he called the "oddity of eating bad chicken curry in Copenhagen". It is rare for journalists to be so unsparing in their criticism of their hosts.

Clearly, the managing editor of the prestigious magazine India Today had solid grounds to say what he said about the Danish leg of the prime minister's three-nation tour.

On his first trip abroad as part of Vajpayee's media party, Dasgupta was most caustic about our mission in the Danish capital headed by former journalist, H. K. Dua.

According to Dasgupta, "For the media entourage, the trip has been marked by a series of disasters … upon landing in Copenhagen the media was lectured to by a gentleman who was a potential recruit to the Gestapo.

"The mess was compounded by his instruction that the India-EU Business Summit was out of bounds for hacks … it could have been resolved if the local Indian embassy had any meaningful contact with any section of Danish society.

"It is, however, on the best of terms with the management of the Taj restaurant (no relation to the real thing) in downtown Copenhagen … many slept that cold Copenhagen night hungry … others boycotted the dinner, muttering profanities.

"If it had not been for the alert MEA spokesperson, Vajpayee would have been relegated to the corner seat at the press conference. Speaks volumes of local arrangements. And about journalist Dua's foray into the rarefied world of diplomacy."

What is a pet? How can its worthiness be evaluated? Who can certify its import? And how many pets should a person be allowed to bring into the country?

These and other weighty questions were on the agenda of a recent high-level inter-ministerial meeting in New Delhi. The Department of Animal Husbandry was insistent on regulating the import of pets and, for all it cared, how this was to be done was not its problem.

The procedure involved cumbersome paper work and a lot of bother for the hard-pressed customs department. The existing stipulation for a licence from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade leads to much confusion at the airport.

Even the price of the pet being imported needs to be disclosed before the grant of the permission. (For instance, the price of the dog brought in by the U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill given in the relevant application was $48.)

How and where do you quarantine the pets coming in without proper permission? You cannot possibly lock them up in the same space in which you quarantine unwelcome humans or can you?

How do you ensure that the pets are not carrying any disease or virus? How reliable are the health certificates produced by the owners of these pets? And how many pets each person should be allowed to bring in? And, above all, what is covered under the definition of a pet?

The Department of Animal Husbandry said it was only concerned about dogs and cats, though others countered that some people kept birds as pets. Well, given the intricacies involved is it any surprise that the 10-odd talking heads representing various departments could reach no conclusion.

Surely, another round of inter-ministerial jaw-jaw was in order. And may be yet another round before they can come to some conclusion.

Two persons conspicuously missing from the hyped up 60th birthday celebrations of Amitabh Bachchan were his younger brother Ajitabh and his nephew who had played a stellar role in the star's life, managing his money and his time when he was at the peak of his filmy career.

Ajitabh, whose purchase of a palatial bungalow in the Swiss canton of Montreux in Switzerland had led to a FERA violation case against the actor, was now replaced by a portly politico-fixer who more or less controls Amitabh's life, the reason being, as the senior Janata Dal (Sharad Yadav) functionary K.C. Tyagi put it, money speaks.

Tyagi suggested that they make another film to be called, what else?, Paisa Bolta Hain (money speaks) with the fixer-politician in the lead role with Amitabh playing the villain.