‘Mama Banavla’: Uddhav Thackeray recently used a pun in New Delhi to criticise the BJP central leadership. He alleged that it was not sure about senior BJP politicians like UP CM Yogi Adityanath and said the leadership was trying to reduce him to normal size. He added that former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Chouhan was shunted to the central government because they did not want him to make it big. Thackeray said the BJP leadership had made a ‘mama’ out of Chouhan. While Chouhan is called ‘mama’ in MP circles, ‘mama banavla’ in Marathi means someone being deceived or cheated.
Congress Media Club: At a meeting of Congress MPs in the Lok Sabha chaired by LoP Rahul Gandhi, many were amused by an advice given by the party’s deputy leader in the Lok Sabha, Gaurav Gogoi. Sitting beside Gandhi, Gogoi said the leadership had noticed that many MPs were talking to media persons on the Parliament premises. He warned them against it, saying that “journalists are nobody’s friends” and they “are only there to get news”. After the meeting, some MPs wondered why Gogoi, who never misses an opportunity to give sound bites in front of cameras in Parliament House and has his own WhatsApp media group, wanted others to avoid the media. They concluded that his advice was perhaps aimed at restricting interaction with the media to what they called a “certain club within the Congress”.
