Column

Is Parliament losing its charm? Not for politicians, maybe. But the captains of industry seem to be less and less enamoured of the hub of Indian democracy, especially after they’ve seen it from inside.

Two corporate baron MPs, Kingfisher’s Vijay Mallya and VN Dhoot of Videocon fame, will be discarding their politicians’ hats when their Rajya Sabha terms end this coming April.

And the buzz here is that neither wants a second innings. Mallya, who has taken to jetting around with Sharad Pawar these days, was apparently offered a seat by the NCP but he demurred.

Both retiring MPs have been increasingly playing hooky and are rarely seen when Parliament is in session. Maybe they have better things to do with their time than spend it waiting for proceedings that never happen because of frequent disruptions and adjournments.

Or maybe they’ve concluded that in this liberalised era, Parliament is no longer the entry point for access to power circles. Of course, it won’t be a permanent goodbye. As former MPs, both can walk into Parliament whenever they want.

A long with these two corporate honchos, the terms of three ministers are also coming to an end in April. Murli Deora and Prithviraj Chavan from Maharashtra and Suresh Pachauri from Madhya Pradesh are among the MPs who will retire this year.

Getting them back into Parliament is proving to be a headache for the Congress, given that the party’s strength in state assemblies has reached its nadir at this point in politics.

The Congress can claim only one Rajya Sabha seat from Maharashtra and none from Madhya Pradesh.

With Deora almost a certainty for the Maharashtra seat, the party has to decide how to accommodate Chavan and Pachauri. Chavan is a general secretary and can be drafted into the party full time.

There is also speculation that he may head back to Mumbai to replace Vilasrao Deshmukh as chief minister, provided the Congress can bring itself to make the change.

As for Pachauri, he could be positioned as state president in preparation for the upcoming assembly elections at the end of the year. And if the Congress wins, then who knows, he may even be the next CM!

There a certain irony in the way the Left and the Right (BJP) are quibbling over who should get the Bharat Ratna, Jyoti Basu or Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Just a few years ago, when the ‘secular’ mood overtook the NDA government in its last year in power in New Delhi, Vajpayee’s PMO offered the CPI (M) patriarch the Padma Vibhushan.

It had presented the Bharat Ratna to Bismillah Khan the year before. While apologising to Basu that it was not in a position to give another Bharat Ratna award so soon, the Vajpayee government urged him to accept the country’s second highest award. Needless to say, Basu declined the honour, saying that he could not take it from a BJP-led government.

TAILPIECE

AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa’s power Pongal lunch with Narendra Modi on January 14 has turned into a threesome with BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad being the other honoured invitee.

Prasad was quite hurt at being left out initially because he had devoted a lot of time to cultivating the lady, first as BJP office bearer overseeing Tamil Nadu and then as I&B minister in the Vajpayee government. With Jayalalithaa poised to be a major player in the next Lok Sabha, Prasad has earned himself a seat at the political high table with the luncheon invitation.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net