The other morning, our cleaning lady came to work with an agenda. Babita has always been our barometer for what matters to the world outside our newsroom. When the government was busy dissing Team Anna as a bunch of holier-than-thou activists prone to histrionics, Babita said, “Didi, if something happens to Anna, we are not going to spare them.” And even before the UPA had unveiled its social security scheme, Babita demanded to know when we would provide her health insurance as it was about to become mandatory by law.

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“I’m really angry today,” she said, although, she was still sporting her smile, “I want you to ask Sardarji to run my household with Rs32 per day. If anyone can do that, then they should be made a crorepati.” I knew she was talking about the planning commission’s affidavit in the Supreme Court defining poverty and I was about to tell her how it was controversial and was already opposed by people whose opinion mattered, like economist Jean Dreze. But Babita wasn’t finished yet. “My husband was making fun of me,” she was laughing by now, “He says do you know you are rich?”

It occurred to me that Babita was actually the textbook case that the plan panel spoke of in their affidavit. She was a mother of three boys and although her husband worked, he had a drinking problem so she never saw any of that money. She had three jobs, which meant she worked from 7am till 6pm and she pulled in an impressive Rs10,000 per month. And yet, she says, of late, she wasn’t being able to give her boys milk every day. And they were also skimping on veggies.

“I take out Rs100 in the morning, but it finishes by evening so I don’t know how they think Rs32 is enough?’’ By now I was really feeling guilty and would probably have given her a raise if she asked me but Babita had bigger demands. “If they take away my ration card, my boys will starve so will you ask them what people like me should do?”

For Babita, I was willing to ask everyone in government this question. From the plan panel, to the finance ministry, which had recently blamed international trends for the hike in petrol prices, to even the Prime Minister’s Office. But was anybody listening?

Just about the time, when the finance minister and the entire cabinet should have been planning how to tackle this devil called price rise and how to convey their action plan to their citizens, they decide to plunge the entire government into a self-made crisis.

What else would you call it? The contentious Finance Ministry letter uses the most bureaucratic, technical jargon to allege very simply that if anyone’s to blame, it’s the former finance minister P Chidambaram for not insisting on revising prices or auctioning of spectrum and not Pranab Mukherjee, who was the head of the Group of Ministers on spectrum. Apart from the now infamous suggestion in that letter that Chidambaram could have cancelled licenses, it also points out how Chidambaram’s ministry failed to follow up and insist on bringing pricing under the ambit of the spectrum GoM. So, it’s a classic cover-your-own-back letter which was sent just a week before the CBI filed its charge sheet against A Raja and company.

I’ve covered the spectrum case since it started and I can tell you that nothing has stumped officials and investigators more than this letter. For more than 24 hours, no one including ministers knew just how to respond to this letter. The suave law minister didn’t know whether to doubt its authenticity or to just defend the home minister.

Seasoned bureaucrats said they had never seen a ministry slam their former boss in such a manner. Although, they did admit that there was a remote possibility that some junior official composed this note and with the oversight of his bosses, it even passed Pranab’s desk. But they said, the chances of this were very, very slight considering the history the two ministers shared. And for the CBI, perhaps, their worst fears were coming true. The evil Right to Information Act, whose clutches they had escaped, had thrown up a document which they had no clue about and which was pushing them into uncomfortable territory.

So in the end, the forever complex and jargon threatening 2G case had just ensured that it was back in the news even though people like Babita and others (even those who’d done post grad school) had no interest in it at all. Before this letter, I had stopped chasing the spectrum story when even my news hungry colleagues told me that they were lost in the 2G maze, that they didn’t care in so many details anymore because the perpetrators were in jail and the biggest part of the story was now over. It’s not, obviously, and maybe there are many more accused for the CBI to chase.

But what should I tell Babita? Should I tell her the prime minister has bigger problems to tackle right now than to provide healthy meals for her sons at affordable rates? Or should I just tell her that the men in our government are engaged in a silly fight for their ego which is affecting all of us. I think with a family of four men, she might understand that much better. And in the meantime, I should also give her a raise.

— Sunetra Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News