Column

There’s play and there’s shadow play. What you see on screen is not what happens behind it. The outcome of the latest UPA-Left committee meet on the nuclear deal was sealed and delivered before the formal talks actually began.

Few saw Sitaram Yechury slip into Pranab Mukherjee’s room in Parliament House the day before. He went in through the back door to negotiate the language of the joint statement to be issued after the meeting.

So when the curtain rose on the talks the next day, an agreed text was already on the table for release to the press later. The meeting became merely an excuse to drink tea and present a united front of bonhomie.

That’s the way it goes with most political negotiations. The deal is hammered out somewhere else. And then the show begins.

Occasionally, someone lets the cat out of the bag. In this case, it was CPI leader AB Bardhan, who shot his mouth off in a television interview early in the week and revealed that the Left would lift its blockade on the IAEA talks at the next meeting of the UPA-Left committee.

Government and CPM interlocutors were horrified to see the news flash on TV. After reaching a broad understanding at the PM’s lunch last Saturday, both sides had agreed to keep shut about the deal till the committee met.

Bardhan frantically tried to get the news flash taken off air, but the channel refused. A bullet can’t be recalled after the trigger is pulled. Bardhan could only offer apologies to his angry comrades and take the usual plea of politicians.

His remarks were torn out of context, he complained to correspondents the next day.

With all Congress leaders, old and young, out to impress the crown prince, the meetings of the committee to draft the resolutions for the AICC session stretched interminably into a big yawn.

Pranab Mukherjee showed off his encyclopaedic memory of Congress history and AICC sessions under Indira Gandhi. Arjun Singh couldn’t let that pass and despite his frail health and faint voice, insisted on speaking at every meeting too.

But the biggest surprise was AK Antony. Normally reticent and tongue-tied, he suddenly became as voluble as the next Congressman.

Out of deference for the elders, Rahul Gandhi heard them out quietly but the more perceptive noticed that his body language showed distinct impatience. Like his father Rajiv, the Gandhi scion has little time for lengthy presentations.

Rajiv used to ask for everything in ‘one page’. Rahul’s limit is two minutes. That’s what he told those who attended the recent conclave of Youth Congress and NSUI office bearers.

TAILPIECE
With hordes of journos on the prowl for a scoop after the UPA-Left committee would up its deliberations, the media’s favourite sources of information, CPI leaders AB Bardhan and D Raja, came up with a brilliant escape plan.

Instead of driving back to their party headquarters at Ajoy Bhavan, where dozens of television crews and print reporters were waiting, they took a detour to the residence of Forward Bloc leader Debabrata Biswas.

They walked in, looking as pleased as Punch, only to find a bunch of journos sitting there already. No escaping the media, Bardhan grumbled when he realized their evasive action had flopped.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net