Regional Journal: Untold stories from the provinces

Will CM shift Jalandhar home?

Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann announced that Jalandhar would be his “second capital” and that he would continue to pay attention to this ancient city even after the bypoll. Now it seems that the CM will give up his rented house and may shift to the house of Divisional Commissioner Gurpreet Sapra in the Old Baradari colony – it helps that the house is huge, as big as 7 acres, with gardens and areas dedicated to growing both wheat and vegetables. An Officer on Special Duty (OSD) to the CM has already toured the house and has proposed certain structural changes for making space for creating larger waiting lounges. It helps that senior officials, including Commissioner of Police, Deputy Commissioner, DIG Jalandhar Range and SSP Rural, will practically be a phone call away, as all of them live in the same locality.

Fitness matters

When Mansukh Mandaviya was the Union Health Minister, he and his ministerial team undertook a diet plan crafted by a Gujarat-based doctor. The whole group lost considerable weight in a very short time, attracting queries from all around. Mandaviya’s successor in the Union Health Ministry and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president JP Nadda is also learnt to be consulting the same sbased allopath now.

Mystery around UPSC chief’s resignation

The news of Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) chairman Manoj Soni’s sudden resignation raised many eyebrows this week. Considered close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Soni joined the commission on June 28, 2017, and became its full-time chief in May 2023. He had five years of his tenure left. While he cited personal reasons for his resignation, insiders said he had quit long before the Puja Khedkar issue blew up. It is believed that Soni, a monk of the Swaminarayan Sect’s Anoopam Mission in Gujarat, has returned to serve the organisation that supported his education after his father’s untimely demise when he was still very young. Soni may land a global role in the sect.

Khudian’s loss

Punjab Agriculture Minister Gurmeet Singh Khudian recently had to cut a sorry figure in front of Union Agriculture & Farmers Welfare Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, when he went seeking a package for crop diversification. Chouhan is learnt to have told Khudian about the central scheme of incentivising farmers by Rs 17,500 per hectare, for helping shift from paddy to other crops, which had been proposed to the state government some time back. When Khudian expressed his ignorance over such a scheme, Chouhan asked his officers to give him a copy. It has since transpired that Khudian was not told about the scheme because the model code of conduct for the elections had kicked in. The Centre-state apathy is clearly the loss of Punjab’s farmers as paddy transplantation was almost over by the time the scheme was announced.

Clean bowled!

A day before his resignation was accepted by President Droupadi Murmu, the Governor of Punjab and Administrator of UT, Chandigarh, Banwarilal Purohit, tried his hand at cricket. The occasion was the inauguration of the gully cricket tournament at the Sector 16 stadium. As part of the inauguration, Purohit took the crease as batter to face UT SSP Kanwardeep Kaur as the bowler. The octogenarian media baron-turned-politician was clean bowled on the very first ball by the young woman IPS officer. Nobody then knew that Purohit would be bowled out from the city the very next day.

Mission seat of politicos

Who says proximity isn’t everything? When CM Bhagwant Mann visited Muktsar district on Saturday, an AAP leader asked a flunky to occupy the sofa right next to the CM’s sofa — once the CM reached the venue and sat down, the flunky left the sofa for his boss. Earlier, too, when Badals were in power, four-five people always used to sit on the rear seat of then Deputy CM Sukhbir Badal’s SUV, a few in each other’s laps, just so that they could be as close to the centre of power even if it was only as long as the ride lasted.

Contributed by Deepkamal Kaur, Aditi Tandon, Ruchika M Khanna, Nitin Jain and Archit Watts