With Sonia Gandhi back in charge of the Congress, her trusty political aide Ahmed Patel has regained his position as the power behind the throne with a decisive say in all big decisions. But one important decision still pending, although Sonia has been interim president for nearly two months now, is the appointment of a replacement for Divya Spandana to manage the party’s Twitter handle.

Patel is said to be on the lookout for someone suitable in keeping with Sonia’s personality. Spandana was Rahul Gandhi’s controversial choice. She stoked several storms with her tweets and earned the wrath of many senior leaders. But Rahul seemed quite enamoured of her punchy, personalized attacks on Modi and the BJP. She seems to have vanished after the party’s decimation in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

She went off Twitter and all internal Congress WhatsApp groups. Speculation is rife that she has gone off to London to take a break and contemplate her next course of action. Congress circles say that the person who will now run the party’s Twitter handle will be chosen by Patel. Two names are doing the rounds: Rohan Gupta and Pawan Khera. Both were active panelists on TV channels till the Congress decided to withdraw from television debates after its poll defeat. The party is not very active on Twitter after Spandana quit.

It’s left to individual leaders to tweet on behalf of the Congress with Priyanka Vadra turning out to be the most prolific of them. She tweets even more than Rahul Gandhi and mostly in Hindi.

New beef in J&K

An unusual situation has arisen in Jammu & Kashmir following the withdrawal of Article 370 and the bifurcation of the state. The 157-year old beef ban has disappeared, much to the dismay of Hindu and Buddhist communities there. The ban was scrapped because of the enactment of the J&K Reorganisation Act that bifurcated the state into two union territories on August 5.

Under this Act, all 153 state laws were repealed. The beef ban was one such law. It seems to have gone unnoticed by the union home ministry which has not yet moved to plug this gap. Now the J&K Law Commission has made a strong demand for the ban to be re-instated forthwith. Interestingly, although J&K was a Muslim majority state, the slaughter and consumption of beef was prohibited. The ban was imposed in 1862 by the then Dogra ruler Maharaja Ranbir Singh and not removed by any government in Srinagar, whether headed by National Conference, Congress or PDP.

A lotus and a lily

The sari that Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina wore to the UN function marking Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary sparked off a storm in the Indian media. Some journalists mistook the flowers on the border for lotuses and got so excited that they tweeted about Hasina’s deference to the Indian national flower which is held sacred by Hindus and also happens to be the BJP’s election symbol.

Ignorance knows no bounds. It turns out that what these journalists mistook for a lotus was actually a water lily which happens to be Bangladesh’s national flower. There is a vague similarity between the two including their purplish-pink colouring. But a fact check was called for. After all, why should Hasina wear a sari decorated with the Indian national flower instead of the national flower of her own country?

In one voice

With Arun Jaitley’s passing away, Amit Shah seems to have taken over the task of formulating the party line for spokespersons and TV panelists every day. According to BJP circles, Shah and BJP working president J P Nadda discuss the issues of the day and the spin that the party should give. Nadda then communicates it to the spokespersons and panelists so that they speak in one voice.

This was Jaitley’s responsibility for a long time. In fact, in the early days of the government, he used to hold a daily morning meeting with spokespersons and panelists and brief them. All the spokespersons and panelists were handpicked by him. Clearly, they did a good job because Shah has made few changes.

Madhav sidelined?

Political circles are buzzing with speculation about once powerful BJP general secretary Ram Madhav’s fall from grace. He used to be all over the place as the party’s most prominent face for J&K and the Northeast and in diplomatic and strategic circles. But for the past many months, he is almost invisible. His absence was noted in the composition of two key party delegations that went abroad recently.

One was an 11-member group that went to China. The other was a two-member delegation led by BJP vice president Vinay Sahasrabuddhe to Mongolia. Madhav is supposed to be the BJP’s resident expert on both countries, particularly China on which he has written a book. But he was not included in either delegation. He is also missing from the two regions that were considered his patch – J&K and the Northeast.

As home minister Amit Shah has taken charge of all matters relating to J&K, both on behalf of the government and on behalf of the party. He is being ably assisted by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and BJP vice president Avinash Khanna. The Northeast is now almost exclusively managed by Congress export Himanta Biswa Sarma who is convenor of the Northeast Democratic Alliance. The buzz in party circles is that Madhav has been sidelined for a stray comment during the 2019 campaign in which he suggested that the BJP may not reach the majority mark on its own.