Glasshouse

SOMETHING FISHY

Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Chandrababu Naidu may be 76 years old and serving a fourth term, but he still works hard on projecting a ‘grounded’ image. The CM has been busy touring remote villages, with the latest ‘outreach’ unfolding in Nellore district, known for its spicy fish curry, chepala pulusu. Visiting a fishing community last week, Naidu stopped at a fish stall, chatted with women vendors, bought some fish and then visited a local family who cooked a curry for him. His PR machinery was at hand with the cameras, capturing him stirring the dish, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and eating with the fisherman’s family. Not everyone is impressed, though. The opposition YSR Congress called it theatre. The party-affiliated Sakshi TV even alleged it was a “low-budget fish market set”, pointing to the “brand new” stove and utensils. Cooked-up or not, dining with the poor is one PR strategy every politician loves.

AUTOWALA NETA | RAJBHAR REVS IT

Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP) chief Om Prakash Rajbhar, who is a minister in the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, is now recasting himself as an “autowala neta”. The trigger came on May 22, when deputy CM Brajesh Pathak, speaking at a gathering in Lucknow, commented on how Rajbhar was an autorickshaw driver in Varanasi before entering politics. Soon enough, the opposition Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav took a swipe at him on social media. Rajbhar hit back by driving around in an autorickshaw on Lucknow’s roads on May 24. In a post on X, he said he wanted to remind “Akhilesh and his trolls” that he came from a hard-working background, and accused the SP chief of practising “AC-PC” (air-conditioned press-conference) politics. Rajbhar now claims he will regularly drive an auto-rickshaw from his residence in Gautam Palli to his party office on Park Road.

COLOURED REMARKS

On May 23, Bihar CM Samrat Choudhary said that with nearly 4,000 CCTV cameras across Patna, AI will quickly identify criminals wearing a “hara gamchha (green towel)”. The Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), whose party colour is green, immediately took umbrage. Samrat, in the same speech, had clarified that he was not targeting anyone specific and had insisted that “criminals have no religion”. But by then the colours had begun to bleed. Lalu Prasad’s daughter Rohini Acharya hit back with references to “bhagwa gamchha-dhari gunda” (saffron towel-wearing goon), while brother and RJD chief Tejashwi Yadav dismissed the CM’s remarks as “laughable”. Now to see who wins the gamchha wars?

THE LAST SALVO

Twenty days after the bruising defeat in West Bengal, Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee went on Facebook Live on May 24 ready for battle: “The war is not over, the mandate had been fiddled with....” The timing was significant. The same day, the BJP comfortably won the Falta seat re-election, while her TMC finished a distant fourth. Mamata, though, was all fire and brimstone, claiming 150 assembly seats had been “altered through electoral manipulation”. Unfortunately for her, numbers on the ground seem far less obliging than the rhetoric online.

IN POOR HEALTH

There is much that ails Gujarat’s civil hospitals, but it has taken health minister Praful Pansheriya seven months in office to discover at least some facets of the malaise. The immediate issue: a junior pharmacist accused of denying subsidised medicines to patients despite adequate stocks. Pansheriya has taken a “serious view” of the matter, says an official press release. The pharmacist has been transferred to the arid Kutch region, but the larger question is whether the action will stop there or will the state push for structural reforms in the public healthcare system?

—with Prasad Nichenametla, Ashish Misra, Amitabh Srivastava, Arkamoy Datta Majumdar and Jumana Shah