Adityanath, Mayawati spar on policing as Noida prepares for commissionerate

On the day Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath (pictured) gleefully announced that the state cabinet had approved the proposal to introduce the office of police commissioner in Lucknow and Noida, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) President Mayawati lost no time in taking a potshot at the government. In a Twitter post, she observed merely making changes in the police hierarchy at a few places would not improve law and order, but tough action was needed against criminal elements by rising above the political divide. In his press interaction after chairing the state cabinet meeting on Monday, Adityanath had blamed the previous regimes in UP for failing to adopt the police commissioner model owing to the lack of “political will”.

Set to get rewards!

Some senior leaders of the Madhya Pradesh Congress may soon get a new year gift. The party is set to appoint new chairpersons to boards and corporations in the state. Sources say those who got the ticket to contest in the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections will have to wait this time because the party will not consider them for these appointments. Instead, it will give preference to those who “struggled for it for a decade and a half when it was exiled from the corridors of power”. Those to be rewarded may include K K Mishra, Shobha Oza, Pankaj Chaturvedi, and Kavita Pandey. However, the state and central leaderships are wary of factionalism, which may worsen after the appointments. Party General Secretary Dipak Babaria recently met Chief Minister Kamal Nath and asked him to maintain a better balance between the All India Congress Committee and the Pradesh Congress Committee

A bureaucrat’s last laugh

Bureaucrats joining private companies is not new. But tainted ones joining a debt-ridden firm and turning it around is surprising and, if one may add, a quasi-vindication of the gamble. An IAS officer who had graft and fraud charges against him resigned with the regime change in the state to whose cadre he belonged. He soon joined an infrastructure company before the new government opened any cases to implicate him. The company also concluded its two-year-long efforts to find a suitor for its troubled projects at the same time and took him on board despite the taint. Maybe here it was a bit of “prior experience and contacts” that counted. No one’s judging, said a competitor, but clearly the company and the ex-bureaucrat had the last laugh.