05 August 2004	Thursday	18 Jamadi-us-Saani 1425

Minister of state E. Ahmed seems to have earned his stripes in the ministry of external affairs. He has impressed South Block's stiff-upper-lipped mandarins by using his vast network of contacts in the Arab world to open doors in the tense and delicate negotiations for the release of the three Indian hostages in Iraq.

Ahmed unearthed scholars and eminent leaders in the Sunni ulema who helped to establish a back channel to the abductors, suspected to be Sunnis. While the government has been working at various levels and raising as many links as it can find to the abductors, there is open acknowledgement in MEA of Ahmed's substantive contribution to the process.

In fact, Ahmed was the first off the block, phoning his friends and acquaintances for help before MEA's diplomatic network in the Gulf got active. And he's really thrown himself into the exercise, summoning meetings of the crisis management group several times a day, starting early in the morning and ending late at night.

As compensation for his slave-driving ways, Ahmed has been treating officials to sumptuous Kerala meals whenever the meetings are held at his residence. He's come a long way from his shaky start, when he was dubbed Minister for Kerala Affairs because of his single-minded devotion to the cause of Malayali expatriates in the Gulf.

The Congress party's new media department chief, Girija Vyas, has wasted no time in playing boss. "You're the spokespersons, I'm the chairperson," she announced to her colleagues at their first meeting after the AICC executive was reconstituted. And she cracked the whip by changing the rules.

For starters, the department meets in the morning to decide the press briefing of the day. Each of the three spokespersons has been assigned a set of topics on which to speak.

And they've been told to beef up the content of their briefings by tapping the resources at 99 South Avenue, which has been converted from an election war room into a research and reference centre.

It's quite a change from predecessor Ambika Soni who had far too much on her plate as Sonia Gandhi's main aide, to expend energy on the media department. Consequently, the spokespersons enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy and they had the luxury of a lazy start because the pre-briefing meetings were usually held in the afternoon.

Having been done in by the increasing sophistication of the cell phone at its Mumbai meeting of the national executive, the BJP banned mobile wonders at its three-day chintan baithak in Goa. None of the leaders were allowed to carry their cell phones into the meeting hall.

The order came after bitter lessons from Mumbai, where cell phones were used to give waiting correspondents a blow-by-blow account of the national executive's in-house deliberations.

After a spate of embarrassing reports appeared in newspapers, BJP leaders conducted an inquiry into the leakage. They discovered that some BJP members had struck side deals with the media. The reporters handed them cell phones with a recording device.

The phones were switched on when the sessions began and the correspondents had their scoops on a platter. That's how juicy details got out of speeches and interventions the BJP would rather have kept under wraps, like Vajpayee ticking off Mahajan and Naidu and making barbed comments about Hindutva.

Another ingenious method that was used was for someone inside to use his cell to dial a correspondent waiting outside and leave the phone on. All the correspondent had to do was listen in. No wonder mobiles were strictly prohibited at Goa. -By Special Arrangement with AsianAge/New Delhi