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| For Azad, winter session comes as a rough weather | | | Abid Shah
Early Times
NEW DELHI, NOV 17: On the eve of Parliament’s winter session, the Congress strongman and Union Minister for Health and Family welfare, Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad, faces rough weather. He has to do a lot of answering during the Parliament session, beginning here Thursday, about the outbreak and continuing threat posed by swine flu as Minister; and as AICC general secretary with the charge of the party affairs in BJP-ruled Karnataka, Mr Azad faces rumblings of revolt, courtesy Congressmen from the State who blame him for promoting party men on important posts who had old ties with Janata Dal leaders.
Mr Azad’s cup of woes got brimming with the closure of a prestigious residential public school at Ajmer in Rajasthan yesterday in the wake of certain wards suddenly falling sick with symptoms of H1N1 virus. Often children of very important persons stay and study at the school in question.
Moreover, the outbreak of fever among the inmates of school hostel has taken place following the visit of a delegation of students from abroad. Rajasthan is a Congress ruled State where most foreign visitors land up after checking into the country at Delhi Airport. The Union Health Ministry has been claiming to have fool-proof scanning system at Capital’s airport like other international airports for the deadly flu virus for those arriving from across the seas.
Yet the suspected outbreak of the flu at Ajmer school is becoming a great source of worry among very consequential people who can well point fingers at the health care system and its inadequacies for which Mr Azad is supposedly responsible.
This is besides the fact that as a very astute hand in politics Mr Azad has been general secretary in-charge of Congress in Karnataka for years now. Despite this, the BJP could not only humble Congress in the last Assembly polls but also survive a recent internal crisis, leaving the Congress in the cold.
The reason given by old Congress hats for the inertia afflicting the party ranks is that Mr Azad has wittingly or unwittingly ended up in entrusting important party posts and responsibilities to persons who have either a Janata Dal background or have closeness to the Dal heavyweights in the State.
Congress party men from Karnataka point out on conditions of anonymity that the Pradesh Party president Mr RV Deshpande is known for his closeness to the late Ramakrishna Hegde and, thus, in the past has been critical of even the late Indira Gandhi and the late Rajiv Gandhi.
Similarly, the leader of Congress legislature party in Karnataka, Mr Siddaramaiah, is thought to have been close to the former Prime Minister and Janata Dal leader, Mr HD Devegowda. Karnartaka Congressmen have a longer list of such instances and talk bitterly about what they call loyalty to the Congress and its top leadership being sacrificed to expediency by the party higher ups in Delhi to point fingers at Mr Azad.
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