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Sonia Gandhi gets proactive, takes on the cartoons

She lost her cool more than once and even chided her party leaders during a debate on the recent cartoon row.

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Congress president Sonia Gandhi was in a no-nonsense mood in the Lok Sabha on Monday. She lost her cool more than once and even chided her party leaders during a debate on the recent cartoon row.

It all began with Sonia arriving early. She whispered something to minister of state for telecommunications Jyotiraditya Scindia sitting two rows behind her. He went to Congress MP from Mumbai Sanjay Nirupam and passed on instructions to him and some other MPs. Scindia also got with him a photocopy of the NCERT textbook on political science that has the controversial cartoon on Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr BR Ambedkar.

As soon as speaker Meira Kumar came in at 11am, Sonia looked behind in the hope that Nirupam and the others would raise the cartoon row issue. But it was Samajwadi Party’s Shailendra Kumar who grabbed the opportunity. The speaker, however, asked him to bring up the issue during Zero Hour.

When minister of state for parliamentary affairs Pawan Bansal intervened and said human resources development minister Kapil Sibal had ordered the removal of the cartoon, Sonia literally shouted at him. “Not just the cartoon. No. The whole book,” she said. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee said that the cartoon and portions of the text will be removed. This annoyed Sonia further. “The whole book,” she said loudly.

Sibal went to the first row and tried to explain something to Sonia, but she seemed to disagree and pointed towards the photocopy of the book she had in her hand. Sibal left followed by Mukherjee and Bansal. When the finance minister returned, he was involved in a deep conversation with Sonia. She pointed to the pages in her hand while minister for surface transport Kamal Nath joined them. The Congress president later laughed at something he and Scindia told her. Bansal returned and sat between Nath and Sonia. He showed something in the file he had with him and left.

During the Zero Hour speeches, Sibal showed Sonia a page with a  written statement. It was also shown to Mukherjee before Sibal read it in the House. The statement said the “inappropriate cartoons” in the textbooks were brought to the notice of the ministry only in May and that orders had been issued to withhold the sale of books. Sibal also said that the political science textbooks for standards IX, X and XI were reviewed by a national monitoring council between 2005 and 2007and were approved.

It was an interesting confrontation between the Congress party and the government with Sonia steering the attack. The Congress president wanted the party to be seen on the side of the political class and political parties and existing institutions. All members attacked the new trend of denigrating politicians. Sonia even thumped the table when Akali Dal MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal and BJP’s Yashwant Sinha spoke.

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