Column

No secret remains that way for long in the capital city of gossip. That’s what a Google team realised when it presented similar packages to the Congress and the BJP for a poll campaign page on the internet. LK Advani was impressed with the presentation and he commissioned the team to design a page for him. But the Congress was not, mainly because it didn’t want to share space, even cyber space, with the BJP. The Google team was unprepared for rejection. But then, its youthful techies are not logged into the way the political grapevine works. They didn’t anticipate that news of the deal with the BJP would reach the Congress before they did. So, one hit will lead to Advani and the next to Rahul Gandhi, the surprised techies were asked. Can’t have the Congress and the BJP on the same platform, they were told. One leader jokingly offered to sweeten the rejection by putting a dedicated team to work to inflate Google’s profits by ensuring that the Advani page gets 10,000 hits every day. Apparently, under the terms of the deal, the BJP will shell out Rs10 per hit to Google. At Rs1 lakh a day all the way to the elections, the BJP’s coffers would be badly depleted, laughed the Congressman. Tech-savvy they may be, but Google’s young software executives have a lot to learn about Indian politics.

Obviously, the BJP has failed to plug its leaks. The Congress, on the other hand, made a serious effort to identify the motormouths in its ranks and keep them out of core groups that were drawing up blueprints for the tough electoral battle ahead. That’s the reason the man once described as the Pranab Mukherjee of the next generation because of his impressive drafting skills, Jairam Ramesh, is missing from key committees. He was shown the door after an internal inquiry traced several leaks back to him. At one point, Ramesh was the rising star in the party. He used to write Sonia Gandhi’s speeches, draft statements on her behalf and was even said to be tutoring Rahul Gandhi for his foray into politics. Ramesh, together with Salman Khurshid, ran the party’s war room in the last elections, helping to put together the wildly successful aam aadmi campaign. He’s out in the cold at the moment but as they say, nothing is forever in the Congress party.

Ramesh is not the only star from 2004 to bear the brunt of new equations in the Congress as it prepares to launch its icon for 2009, Rahul Gandhi. This time, the party has divided its substantial ad budget between three companies instead of the well-known public relation firm and image-maker that had the monopoly the last time around. One of the companies hired for the upcoming elections is the MNC, J Walter Thompson. The firm has bagged the most prized contract of all. It will craft and project brand Rahul to challenge Advani for the hearts and minds of the young voters.

TAILPIECE
Home minister P Chidambaram makes a fetish of not speaking Hindi, despite more than two decades in national politics. But his Tamilian reserve slipped last week when he came face-to-face with the bumbling cops of the Delhi Police. It happened while he was on his way back to his North Block office at around the time the Republic Day parade rehearsals were on. While most of us hapless ordinary folk have to suffer the resultant traffic jams all the time, it was Chidambaram’s first experience with the inefficiency of the Capital’s traffic police. He was stuck for 18 minutes on a road choked with cars and horns blaring all around him. He was so irritated that when he got out of his car to upbraid the nearest cop, he burst into accented Hindi. “Bewaqoof,’’ he was overheard snarling at the hapless policeman. “Tum ko kisne inspector banaya?’’ Of course, the quaking cop was in no shape to appreciate Chidambaram’s Hindi moment.