When Maharashtra’s Home Minister R R Patil first mooted the transfer of Bombay’s police commissioner Arup Patnaik a day after some Muslim groups ran riot at the Azad Maidan on August 11, 2012, I am told, Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan told him, “If Patnaik goes, so do you”. Read more

In the 1980s, Chhagan Bhujbal, the then Shiv Sena’s lone MLA in Maharashtra, coined a famous term that has stuck in the minds of many people of that time: ‘bhukhandache Shirkhand’. In other words, he was accusing then chief minister Sharad Pawar of licking up a lot of land (more than 200 plots in Bombay, in fact) that had been de-reserved by him for unknown reasons. Read more

Recently I ran into a friend of union minister for science and technology Vilasrao Deshmukh who told me the latter had been quite incensed with his recent cabinet colleague Gurudas Kamat. Read more

Speaking to a man in the know, the other week, I was rather amused to hear him describe the situation in the Nationalist Congress Party rather succinctly. Read more

The BJP’s Gopinath Munde and Nitin Gadkari have almost always never agreed on anything. Read more

In recent years, Chhagan Bhujbal has been Maharahstra’s toughest Home Minister, even willing to take on Bal Thackeray and throw the Sena supremo into the slammer. Read more

Why am I not so impressed with the hoopla surrounding Anna Hazare and his fast unto death at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi? Read more

It would have happened sooner rather than later. But Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party was prepared for this one. Read more

There was a particularly bounteously placed functionary in the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government in Maharashtra, today highly placed in New Delhi, who once called in a carpenter to make a concealed safe within a bedroom wall. Read more

The kinds of responses that my colleagues Pankaj Vohra, Vinod Sharma, Zia Haq and I get to our liberal-minded writings on our blogs have convinced me that cyberspace has very nearly been captured by a host of narrow-minded saffron bigots who brook no difference of opinion, who have no rational argument to contradict our eclectic approach to the issues we write about and who, therefore, use abuse and denigration in the mistaken hope and belief that that is the best form of intimidation. Read more