What was Pawan Khera’s Plan B?
The Supreme Court has granted (the much needed) relief to Pawan Khera by giving him anticipatory bail in a case linked to allegations he made against Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, the wife of Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam Chief Minister. The relief, however, comes at a time when the five state elections are over and in the interim the Congress lost one of its most powerful voices. Having said that, Khera has thanked the party for standing by him, for ace lawyer and Rajya Sabha MP from the Congress, Abhishek Manu Singhvi led the defence team in the Supreme Court. During this period, especially after the Guwahati High Court turned down the Telangana Court’s stay on his arrest, Khera had camped in Telangana, which is ruled by a Congress CM. And apparently, Revanth Reddy, the Telangana CM, had told the state’s police that under no grounds should the Assam police—or any other agency—be allowed to arrest Khera and take him across the state’s borders. The police were told, if needed, they should themselves arrest Khera on some pretext to ensure that he did not fall in the Assam police’s hands. Is this politicizing the police force? Well, clearly, in light of the recent events (and many more preceding ones), the ship has sailed on that one, for even at the time of writing this column, Punjab police has arrived at the Delhi residence of Sandeep Pathak, the BJP Rajya Sabha MP who had recently defected from AAP, to arrest him. Pathak escaped through the back gate. Need one say more?
Exit of the Exit Polls?
After its debacle in the last Lok Sabha elections, when Axis MY India got the polls wrong, it is playing it safe. In one state at least. Axis has not released its data for West Bengal. That is a state that everyone got wrong in 2021. The reason for withholding data has been explained by Pradeep Gupta (the chairman of Axis) for he claims that as many as 70% of those polled refused to reveal their voting preferences. If this is the case then, whom have the other pollsters spoken to? However, the Axis poll projection on Tamil Nadu has certainly got everyone’s interest because it has projected that the TVK will be the single largest party with 98 to 120 seats. That gives a gap of nearly 100 seats with the projections made by other pollsters. In fact, some have written off TVK’s founder and actor Vijay as the Prashan Kishor of Tamil Nadu. (If you recall, Kishor had a miserable debut in the Bihar polls recently.) Well, that is certainly a pretty broad spectrum for Vijay—whether he will be Tamil Nadu’s Prashant Kishor or the next MGR. Having said this, if the TVK does as well as Pradeep Gupta’s team has predicted, then the Congress will probably be the first to rethink its alliance with the DMK. As it is, even before the polls, a section of state Congress leaders had been advocating an alliance with TVK instead of the DMK. So, watch this space.
Who will be Kerala CM?
There is a lot of speculation as to who the next Chief Minister of Kerala will be, for the Congress-led UDF seems pretty confident of winning this state. A lot of senior leaders have suggested Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal’s name. Venugopal is known for his closeness to Rahul Gandhi more than any other political criteria. Having said this, it is also important to remember that Rahul Gandhi rarely appoints a CM from within his own team. One saw that in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, when both Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot saw their ambitions thwarted at the cost of the older guard. Will the same model be repeated in Kerala?
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