Third eye: Setting the record straight

Setting the Record Straight

A senior Cabinet minister has confided that the NDA government has received an informal communique from Mamata Banerjee that Saugata Roy is not the Trinamool Congress leader in the Lok Sabha and views aired by him should be treated as his “personal opinion”. Sudip Bandopadhyay and Derek O’Brien are Trinamool leaders in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, respectively.

Swap Deal in Bureaucracy

This is a rather uncanny swap deal. In the recent bureaucratic reshuffle, R Subrahmanyam — a 1983-batch IAS officer from Andhra cadre — has been moved out as joint secretary in the rural development ministry to the HRD ministry as additional secretary. He replaces 1983-batch IAS Amarjeet Sinha who was handling technical education in the HRD ministry. Sinha is now additional secretary in rural development ministry.

Ram Gopal Kaun?

While jostling for bytes of senior MPs after the all-party meeting inside Parliament premises on Tuesday, a reporter was heard calling out to SP’s Ram Gopal Yadav as Ram Gopal Verma, the film-maker. While Yadav ignored the faux pas and continued to give details of his party’s view on the ongoing deadlock in Parliament and what transpired in the meeting, minister RP Rudy could not stay quiet. He intervened and corrected the sheepish reporter.

Raising a New Pitch

Reporters sprang to action when they heard that Arun Jaitley had a long chat with NCP chief Sharad Pawar. NCP has been supporting Congress over the suspension of its MPs. While some insisted that the two were working on finding a way out of House logjam, others said Jaitley was trying to break opposition unity. However, the possibility of the two discussing cricket politics also had a fair share of acceptability.