Glasshouse

AKHILESH JOINS THE TEMPLE RUN

If you can’t beat them, join them. At his ancestral home in Etawah, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav has commissioned a Rs 50 crore Kedareshwar Mahadev Temple, said to be a replica of the famed Kedarnath temple in Uttarakhand. The complex already houses a child idol of Lord Ram, installed on Ramnavami, with the formal inauguration of the main temple set for the Sawan Shivaratri this August. On the face of it, the move blends faith and personal legacy. Politically, for a leader often boxed into a ‘pro-Muslim’ image, the temple offers a visible counter, what some SP watchers called a “calibrated step into the BJP’s cultural terrain...but without the loud rhetoric”. The timing is just right. Uttar Pradesh has an assembly election coming up in 2027, and in a state where religion and politics often overlap, even a temple at his home base can carry a larger message.

JAGAN’S 3Cs PROJECT | CAPITAL CONJUROR

Former Andhra Pradesh chief minister Jagan Mohan Reddy’s fascination with a three-cornered capital for the state hasn’t abated, it seems. This, even as Parliament has passed an amendment legitimising the status of Amaravati—TDP chief and current CM Chandrababu Naidu’s choice—as the state’s sole capital (perhaps the only such instance in the country). Jagan and his YSR Congress government (2019-24) had pursued a decentralised, three-capital plan, but it bottomed out after his party lost. Now, he’s manifesting a Plan-B, a ‘capital corridor development’, connecting port-town Machilipatnam and two cities, Vijayawada and Guntur. Amaravati, as expected, lies outside this Jagan plan. The YSRCP chief has even found a catchy acronym, MaViGun, which is fast becoming a trollers’ delight with more and more absurd interpretations of it coming out each day.

FAILED REBOOT

After years of decline, the Congress in Bihar has finally pressed the reset button—only to discover it may have rebooted into the same old system. On March 30, when AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal unveiled the list of 53 district presidents, it set off immediate reactions of a “massive social imbalance”, with upper castes punching way above their demographic weight. The list seemed curiously out of tune with Rahul Gandhi’s sermons on, you guessed it, social imbalances. The state unit, sensing the discord in the ranks, has now requested a revision.

FRIENDLY FOES

Shiv Sena UBT leader Aaditya Thackeray’s presence at the birthday party of BJP leader Mohit Kambon’s daughter in Mumbai has created a flutter among party loyalists. Kamboj, a Congress turncoat-turned-aide of CM Devendra Fadnavis, has had a meteoric rise as a real estate developer in Mumbai. He is also said to have played a big role in toppling the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) regime led by Uddhav Thackeray in 2022. So, is the political not personal for the Thackerays anymore? Or are more realignments in store?

GUJARAT CODE

If politics is theatre, Asaduddin Owaisi knows exactly where to place the spotlight. With the Gujarat local polls slated this month, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief staged quite an entrance, launching the party’s campaign from JP Chowk in Ahmedabad, bang opposite the BJP’s former state headquarters. The AIMIM is expanding this time, contesting 539 seats across six municipal corporations, as well as some 60 panchayat seats. In its 2021 debut, it had won 7 seats in Ahmedabad alone, all snatched from the Congress.

—with Avaneesh Mishra, Prasad Nichenametla, Amitabh Srivastava, Dhaval S. Kulkarni and Jumana Shah