Rajasthan Assembly polls: Gehlot, Pilot rivalry back to haunt Congress

Pilot versus Gehlot

Their apparent camaraderie and bonhomie aside, Congress state unit chief for Rajasthan, Sachin Pilot (pictured), and former Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot are engrossed in a power struggle in the poll-bound state. Both want to ensure that their camp followers get the maximum number of party tickets for the elections on December 7. Of all the five states going to the polls, the Congress is confident of winning at least Rajasthan. According to sources, Gehlot is keen on becoming the chief minister and a compromise has been worked out between him and Pilot. Party leaders do not rule out Pilot being appointed the deputy chief minister under Gehlot for the time being but it is a little secret in the party that chief Rahul Gandhi, busy building a ‘new and younger’ party, favours Pilot.

Image problem

The Indian Air Force (IAF) celebrated its 86th anniversary on Monday. Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu’s official Twitter handle, that of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and several Union ministers and party leaders tweeted their good wishes. However, many used images of fighter jets that have never been part of the IAF fleet. If the Vice-President’s secretariat and Railway Minister Piyush Goyal’s office used images of Lockheed Martin’s F-16, former Jammu and Kashmir deputy chief minister Nirmal Singh and BJP’s official Twitter handle used images of F-15s, which again the IAF doesn’t have in its fleet. The Vice-President’s secretariat, as well as the others, later deleted these tweets. Finally, the Vice-President tweeted his good wishes without any images.

Security above all else

The next time you are at an airport, you might notice a change in the way the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel welcome you. The force responsible for airport security across the country has asked its people not to be over-friendly with passengers as it shifts from a 'broad smile' concept to a more disciplined and 'sufficient smile' theory to welcome travellers so that it can focus more on improving their security, two top officials said Monday. CISF Director General (DG) Rajesh Ranjan said the stress on enhancing soft skills of the airport security personnel had its own pitfalls. "We cannot be over-friendly with the passengers because one of the reasons cited as to why 9/11 (the 2001 terror attack on twin towers in US) happened... was excessive reliance on passenger-friendly features where security personnel went out of the way to ensure that the passenger is facilitated, thereby compromising on security," the DG said.