By Sushil Kutty
A journalist friend got a gift a decade ago – an Emporio-Armani wrist watch which went round his wrist like a dream. One evening it went flying off his wrist into the four-deep raucous crowd lined up around the dance floor at the neighbourhood bar. End of time! An Emporio-Armani is max priced these days at around Rs 50,000. Peanuts compared to Siddaramaiah’s Hublot, going price Rs 40 lakh!
Gifts to journalists and politicians are not considered kosher. The gift could be linked to graft – bribe. But like the saying goes, nobody looks a gift horse in the mouth. Bad teeth is a risk. The trick is not to be seen at the dentist’s. Then, things get rotten. Like what’s happening to Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. The Hublot that graced his wrist for a while has become a noose round his neck. It has been linked to a company man who ran a Ponzi scheme and fled the country with blade-money honest people bled life-sweat for.
Caught in a cleft stick with no time to spare – the Karnataka Assembly elections are on May 12 – Siddaramaiah just this day (May 7, 2018) ducked a ‘Hublot’ question. “This is just another last ditch attempt of the BJP,” he told media. Let’s just hope, for the Congress, it was not Rahu Kaal when he uttered those words because the BJP has been acting like it has chanced upon a Brahmastra in the Hublot.
The fact is things are going from desperate to desperation in Karnataka. Both the Congress and the BJP have set the alarm clocks and neither party has time to spare. They are hanging to straws to upstage the other. For instance, Union IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad realized four years after he met IT company heads in Bengaluru that the ‘IT City’ needs infrastructure, which he had found in 2014 to be downright pathetic. Elections do wonders to politicians. They wake up with the alarm clock ringing. No need for a Hublot to tell them the times they are a bad!
And Congress President Rahul Gandhi – wise as he is to time and tide – took to the bicycle in gold city Kolar to stop time and reverse the clock. If Ravi Shankar Prasad raked up Hublot when speaking of IT City Bengaluru, Rahul Gandhi has no time for Hublot. He has left it to Siddaramaiah to tell the time. In any case, Hublot was handed over to the Karnataka Assembly Speaker in March 2016 and is now a state asset!
But Prasad says it is not about the watch, it is about the Ponzi guy who allegedly presented the Hublot to Siddaramaiah in China. The Karnataka CM says that it is a lie perpetuated over time, that it was another NRI with honesty written on his forehead who gifted him the Hublot. The BJP has circled the Ponzi guy in red along with Siddaramaiah in a picture that is all over the media. A red-faced Chief Minister has retaliated with a picture of ‘Modi with Chhota Modi’ at Davos.
It took Ravi Shankar Prasad four years to hark back to 2014, when it first struck him that Bengaluru needs a makeover. Aware of the slow decline of India’s Silicon Valley, Prasad chose to see it decline further than do wonders. He could have held a press conference at the time and done good to Bengaluru. But for Prasad and the BJP, the four year wait has been worth the time wasted. Prasad says BJP will set up “60 BPOs” at places other than Bengaluru if voted to power. Only time will tell. And Bengaluru can continue to decline.
Siddaramaiah’s bad time started when he got himself clicked with Ponzi Vijay Easwaren at a World Economic Forum (WEF) meet in China in 2013 when the UPA was in power at the Centre. BJP spokesman Sambit Patra says Siddaramaiah must explain his links with Easwaren because the absconding Ponzi runner has been declared a threat to national security by the Serious Frauds Investigation Office (SFIO). It is another matter that Nirav Modi is also an absconder and he was clicked with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the WEF in Davos earlier this year.
Has the SFIO declared Nirav Modi a threat to national security and will pictures of PM Modi and Nirav Modi circled in red do the rounds? Siddaramaiah and Modi are both diamond-struck politicians. Nirav Modi is an ‘Antwerp diamond’ and the Hublot that is giving a bad time to Siddaramaiah is a diamond-encrusted luxury timekeeper of Swiss-make. (IPA Service)
The post Diamond-Studded Trouble For Siddy And Modi appeared first on Newspack by India Press Agency.
