Amar Singh makes a move

They say there’s no smoke without fire. Is something burning then in the Samajwadi Party? Read Jaya Pradha’s lips to answer that question. The SP’s actress-turned-MP lobbed a bombshell the other day when she praised Rahul Gandhi and expressed a fervent desire to see him as prime minister of India one day.

``He (Rahul) is working hard to understand the ground realities and problems of the people. We would like to see him as PM,’’ she was quoted as saying. Now, everyone knows that Jaya Pradha doesn’t even sneeze without permission from the SP’s celebrity politician and her mentor, Amar Singh. Her party colleagues believe that she wouldn’t have dared praise Rahul unless she got a signal from him. It suggests that all is not well between Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh and the former may be shopping for alternatives.

With the SP becoming a family affair, Amar Singh must be feeling quite left out. Mulayam’s son Akhilesh has already taken charge in Uttar Pradesh and now his daughter-in-law Dimple is making her first foray into politics by contesting the bye-election for the Firozabad Lok Sabha seat that Akhilesh vacated. Jaya Pradha’s surprise comment could well be a trial balloon floated by Amar Singh, either as a warning to Mulayam or as part of a quest for life beyond the SP.

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 It looks like the RSS is back to square one in the hunt for a successor to Rajnath Singh for the post of BJP president. Its most favoured horse, former Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar, seems to have blotted his copybook by comparing L K Advani to rancid pickle. While the Sangh bosses want to keep up pressure on Advani to step down from the post of Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha by the end of the year, they goggled at Parrikar’s hyperbolic choice of metaphor.

Rancid pickle can be difficult to digest! Not much information trickles out from behind the iron curtain that surrounds the RSS but the political grapevine in Madhya Pradesh is buzzing with reports that state chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is once again a frontrunner to take over from Rajnath. Chauhan is said to be resisting feelers from the RSS because he doesn’t want to move from Bhopal.

Delhi’s murky politics can be intimidating for a small town boy. As for Rajnath, he is lobbying hard to stay on in Delhi in any which post he can get. Deputy leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha would do just fine, even if it means having to work under Sushma Swaraj who is widely believed to succeed Advani if and when he relinquishes the position.
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TAILPIECE
Considering that the finance ministry will soon begin preparatory work on next year’s budget, it’s strange that the government still hasn’t got down to appointing a successor to Arvind Virmani, chief economic advisor. Virmani is slated to leave shortly for Washington to take over as India’s executive director at the International Monetary Fund.

Manmohan Singh is believed to have sounded out Kaushik Basu, an Indian professor at Cornell University, for the job but talk in North Block is that Pranab Mukherjee hasn’t made up his mind whether to accept a PMO nominee or appoint someone of his choice. After all, the chief economic advisor has to work closely with the finance minister.