Foot in the mouth

A comment that Uttar Pradesh minister and Samajwadi Party (SP) leader Azam Khan made in apparent jest last month has come back to haunt him. When he alleged last week that the Bharatiya Janata Party had taken a donation of Rs 200 crore from a beef exporter, BJP spokesman Vijay Bahadur Pathak hit back immediately, saying that Khan had himself confessed that the money spent during SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav's birthday celebration in Rampur came from people like underworld don Dawood Ibrahim. "Some have come from the Taliban, some from (gangster) Abu Salem, some from Dawood (Ibrahim), some from terrorists..." Khan had said when asked to explain where the money that funded Yadav's grand birthday celebration came from.