Among the many side dramas in the run up to the upcoming Lok Sabha polls is the battle of the Bollywood stars. It's the newest soap opera to hit the idiot box.
Watch families come apart, relationships break down and loyalties turn to dust as fading, ageing actors seek resurrection in politics. Amazingly, it's hit the Congress and the BJP simultaneously, with the potential of causing serious political rifts within.
While the Dutt family saga grabbed eyeballs on television, star wars are exploding in all kinds of unexpected corners and creating havoc. Would you believe, for instance, that Jayaprada has become a major bone of contention between the Congress and the Samajwadi Party?
Their ongoing talks for an electoral alliance in Uttar Pradesh have run aground over her Rampur Lok Sabha seat. The Congress wants it for old loyalist and Gandhi friend Noor Bano who lost to Jayaprada in 2004. Amar Singh flatly refused to accommodate Bano although it was suggested to him that Jayaprada had enough star power to win from another constituency.
It became enough of a prestige issue for Amar Singh to snub the Congress with a suo moto announcement naming Jayaprada the SP candidate for the seat. It's a big blow for the Congress and Bano whose family represented the constituency for years till Jayaprada snatched it away in the last elections.
After the SP rebuff, it seems a section of the Congress has sent feelers to Mayawati in the hope of getting BSP support for Bano. Interestingly, Bano's son, Kazim Ali Khan, is a BSP MLA from an assembly segment in the Rampur area. Mother and son haven't been getting along because of their competing politics (Khan was in the SP before he joined the BSP) but there's talk that a patch-up could be in the offing. It's better than the Virani family soap opera, wouldn't you say?
On the other side, in the BJP, there's a Shatrughan Sinha drama being played out. Sinha has staked claim to the Patna Sahib seat in Bihar. In the process, he has upset party spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad whose father was an old RSS worker and Jan Sangh MLA from the area. Prasad, in fact, has been eyeing the seat for some time and used all his legal skills to get Patna Sahib carved out of the old Patna seat during the recent delimitation exercise.
The idea was to push out the rural areas and create a predominantly urban seat that could easily be won by the BJP. The election promises to be a cakewalk for whomsoever the BJP nominates and Sinha has thrown his hat into the ring with a vengeance.
He has turned a Patna Sahib ticket into a prestige issue and he is believed to have threatened to withdraw his services as the BJP's star campaigner if he doesn't get the nomination. Party leaders in Bihar are reluctant to field Sinha, fearing that his Bollywood commitments and his frequent trips to Mumbai would make him a poor constituency MP and damage the party's long-term political interests.
Prasad is doing some quiet lobbying of his own but Sinha's histrionics have spooked BJP leaders in Delhi. They are petrified that he may throw in the towel and quit the party altogether. Politics is definitely more exciting today than the insipid, stale fare being doled out on the entertainment channels.
TAILPIECE: The Dalit families who hosted Rahul Gandhi and British foreign minister David Miliband for one night in Amethi were thrilled to receive such high profile visitors. The spin-offs included a massive facelift for the village, which is one of the usual perks of a VIP visit. But reality set in very quickly when the charitable trust that had provided crisp sheets and warm blankets for the VIP sleepover swooped down the next morning and took away all the bedding, leaving the families with their old tattered bedclothes. Is "development" merely a mirage in rural UP?
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