Letter from Delhi: Jaitley walks away with the honours

Every time a major controversy rocks parliament, the government wheels in the Law Minister Arun Jaitley to quell the opposition challenge.

And he does it with aplomb, silencing all guns trained at the government without sounding harsh or extremist.

Being an ace lawyer, he employs his court-room skills and his capacity to marshal facts and figures to demolish the opposition. In recent weeks the prolonged tussle in parliament over the CBI's handling of the Ayodhya case against Deputy Prime Minister Advani, saw Jaitley cross verbal swords with the Congress Party's lawyer-member Kapil Sibal in the Rajya Sabha. And he duly gets the better of Sibal.

By all counts, Sibal was left speechless when he harped on and on about the misuse of the CBI for ulterior political purposes. Even when he quoted Supreme Court judgements to buttress his case, Jaitley floored him for having conveniently failed to mention the relevant case and the most operative part of the said judgement. And when he cited how the CBI was misused to requisition the army in order to arrest Laloo Yadav in the fodder scam case, Sibal was stunned into silence when Jaitley retorted that 'he should know that the Gujral Government was in power in New Delhi and it was fully supported by his own Congress Party'.

With Sibal getting such a hammering from the Law Minister, no wonder other lawyer-members in the Rajya Sabha hardly take on Jaitley in a frontal verbal clash.

The proposal of a synchronised national and state polls is a non-starter. There are no takers for it in the Opposition or even in the ruling National Democratic Alliance. The idea of a simultaneous poll was first debated in the top echelons of the BJP nearly three months ago. Later the Vice-President, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, endorsed it publicly. But no one paid much heed until last week when the Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani publicly revived it. Now everyone who mattered sat up and took note, and, by and large, they all nixed it for several valid and not-so-valid reasons. Admittedly, there is no stopping the NDA Government in advancing the next general election which is not due till November next year.

But the million dollar question is whether the Vajpayee Government is ready and willing to cut short its five-year term by nearly a year. An early election to exploit a favourable electoral wind makes immense political sense. But in the absence of a tangible swing, the NDA would be taking a calculated gamble.

It is undeniable that the idea of elections has put the brakes on sensible governance. Decision-making is at a standstill. The charitable explanation for Advani's proposal is that he wanted to sow the seeds of confusion in the Opposition and had to an extent succeeded in so doing. But the uncharitable talk in the BJP circles is that Advani was keen for Vajpayee to lead the present NDA back to victory just when the opposition was still in disarray and then after the poll he would try and manoeuvre Vajpayee into taking voluntary retirement so that he could realise his prime ministerial ambition.

But anyone who knows Vajpayee knows well that he is unlikely to curtail his own prime ministerial tenure and go for an early election. In short, Advani's trial balloon may well be pricked by his own party.

In a recent panel discussion on Pakistan TV (PTV) the anchor posed the following question to the four top-notch advertising executives: Has the era of advertising yielded to that of PR or networking? Well, in India more and more advertising companies have opened PR subsidiaries which openly undertake 'fixing' for huge fees. A couple of former journalists have floated their own PR outfits, though, most surprisingly, they still continue to enjoy the hospitality of newspaper columns.

But a newly-floated TV news channel has taken PR new heights. It has forked out high-profile programmes to senior journalists, thus ensuring free publicity in newspaper columns. Incidentally, the same channel has for long made it a policy to buy goodwill for itself the easy way by hiring the wards of influential people. Most recently, the channel took under its wing the daughter of a former Information and Broadcasting Minister, who now holds forth on the small screen....