Coal block, mental block

Trinamool Congress' Kalyan Banerjee, as chairman of the Standing Committee on Coal and Steel, went hammer and tongs against the coal block allocations between 1993 and 2010, terming them "illegal and unauthorised". He demanded that all blocks that had not started production should be immediately scrapped. "No transparent system was followed and it was total abuse of power by the government," Kalyan thundered. To this, a journalist pointed out that Trinamool Congress Chief Mamata Banerjee, who was coal minister in the previous National Democratic Alliance government, was also involved in the allocations. That stumped Kalyan who, ever the party loyalist, came up with an absurd answer after a second: "Every coal minister is not party to the allocation process."