By IANS,
New Delhi : While the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) V.K. Malhotra is using SMSes and even a website for his electioneering, his rival and Delhi Congress Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit by her own admission is not “tech savvy”.
At the Congress’ meet-the-candidates event for mediapersons ahead of Delhi’s Nov 29 polls, Dikshit said she finds it difficult to even open a website without help.
To a query whether she has any plans to create her own website to reach out to voters, Dikshit said: “I don’t have any plans of creating any website simply because I am not so tech savvy. I have difficulty in even opening a website!”
But like any smart politician, she had something to add.
“In any case, these things (websites etc) are more popular amongst the youth. I believe in one-to-one contact with people and my voters,” said Dikshit, who has ruled the state for 10 years.
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Delhi Congress show or ‘no-show’?
It was supposed to be a media interaction with all the 70 candidates of the Congress party who will contest the Delhi assembly polls Nov 29.
However, with just a handful of them turning up at the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee’s (DPCC) meet-the-candidates event Saturday and chaos reigning, the show was not quite the interaction it was supposed to be.
Barely 35 odd candidates, including Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit (New Delhi), Amod Kanth (Sangam Vihar), Kiran Walia (Malviya Nagar) and Prem Singh (Ambedkar Nagar), posed for the scores of cameras, showing the ‘V’ sign. The thin attendance of the candidates was more than obvious.
DPCC president J.P. Aggarwal, however, put up a brave face for this ‘no show’. “The ones who could not make it are busy with their campaigning,” he said.
While the candidates were missing, the number of supporters for the event seemed high – and much of the buzz was concentrated around the food tables.
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Once a chief minister, now in crowd
Once counted as a heavyweight politician in Delhi, former Delhi chief minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Madan Lal Khurana now seems to be fading away.
At a conference Saturday where BJP leader L.K. Advani inaugurated Delhi chief ministerial candidate V.K. Malhotra’s website, the manner in which Khurana suffered neglect from both party leaders and mediapersons summed up his position in today’s Delhi politics well.
The camera kept focusing on Delhi BJP chief Harsh Vardhan, Malhotra and senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley but didn’t give enough attention to Khurana who was sitting some seats away.
Even when the conference ended and Khurana started his ‘long walk’ back, no mediaperson came to talk to him. Ironically, Khurana was the one under whom the BJP had fought the 2003 assembly elections.
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Makwana’s slip of tongue
Saturday was his big day. Yogendra Makwana, former union minister and a Congress rebel, was announcing to a packed room that he was forming a new political party. But there was a faux pas.
As journalists scribbled his every word, Makwana, who fell from grace in the Congress this week for publicly criticising the party, said his new party’s name was “National Congress Bahujan”.
Then he corrected himself: “It is National Bahujan Congress (NBC) party.” Makwana will be the national president of NBC.
Quipped someone in the gathering: “It happens. He is not used to so much media glare. It was just a slip of tongue.”