HOW TO LOSE AN ELECTIONThe Congress keeps finding ways to lose elections it could have salvaged. This time, it’s Kanhaiya Kumar, who minds the party’s student wing, NSUI, in the dock after rebel candidate Deepanshu Shokeen won the Delhi University student’s union (DUSU) vice-president’s post with 30,615 votes. The NSUI’s official candidate, Vir Chatrath, son of AICC member Manish Chatrath, managed just 4,313 votes, even less than NOTA. Shokeen says he was overlooked for a candidate who had been “parachuted in from London”. The Congress counters that he was offered the nomination for the president’s post but had declined to fight fellow Jat, Yash Dabas, the candidate of the ABVP, the BJP’s student wing. In the end, the story is that a bus conductor’s son trounced the organisation’s chosen face, bringing scrutiny again to the party’s handling of nominations.BACKHANDED CRITICISMA FEW FILO-FACTS Bihar chief minister Samrat Choudhary still describes ex-CM Nitish Kumar as the “tallest” NDA leader in the state. But at the Aaj Tak Panchayat in Patna on September 18, the CM also offered a revealing contrast in governance between him and his predecessor. During his years with Nitish, Choudhary claimed, he had seen people come to meet the CM five times a year with the same request, the application moving to the bottom of the pile each time. Choudhary says he has introduced a statewide digital system now that has disposed of 96 per cent of the 850,000 applications that have come his government’s way. The successor, it seems, is now advertising a different model of running Bihar.LANDING BLOWS After CM Revanth Reddy alleged in the Telangana assembly that his predecessor and Bharat Rashtra Samithi chief K. Chandrashekar Rao’s family had amassed properties worth Rs 1 lakh crore, the latter’s son, K.T. Rama Rao (KTR), stumped everyone by saying the family would hand it all over to Revanth for just Rs 1,000 crore. Calling out the “baseless charges”, he quipped that the remaining Rs 99,000 crore could then be used to fulfil the Congress’s pending poll promises to farmers and women. The CM has now ordered a survey of the land around KCR’s Erravelli farmhouse to “establish the facts”.SINGLE REQUEST Wedding preparations are in full swing at the Aligarh home of Uttar Pradesh basic education minister Sandeep Singh, who is tying the knot on November 14. However, on September 19, some uninvited guests landed up. OBC aspirants for the 7,000 vacant assistant teacher posts staged a protest outside Singh’s Marris Road home, demanding jobs pending since 2018. The punchline was in the placards. “Mantriji, aap to shaadishuda ho jaenge, hum berozgar kya kunware mar jayenge? (Minister, you will soon get married, will we the unemployed die as bachelors?”).CO-OP CLOUT Dileep Sanghani, chairman of fertiliser giant IFFCO, is going global. The ex-Gujarat minister and Lok Sabha MP was elected director-at-large on the 30-member board of the International Cooperative Alliance, which represents over 3 million cooperatives worldwide. Sanghani heads IFFCO’s formidable network of 35,700 agri societies, but his influence does not flow from Delhi. In IFFCO’s 2024 board polls, BJP MLA from Jetpur, Jayesh Radadiya, seen as his choice, had defeated the party high command-backed Bipin Patel, vice-chairman of co-op marketing federation, Gujcomasol.—with Amitabh Srivastava, Prasad Nichenametla, Ashish Misra and Jumana Shah- Ends