Delhi Confidential: The Buzz

With Chief Justice of India S A Bobde recommending Justice N V Ramana as his successor, the buzz in the power corridors is that it will be the latter who will have the honour of picking a new director of the CBI as part of the select committee led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Despite the last CBI Director having retired almost two months ago, the government is yet to call a meeting of the select committee, which also has Congress leader of the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhary as its member. With Modi and Chowdhary busy in campaigning in the assembly elections, it is likely that the new director will be appointed only in May when CJI Bobde would have retired.

Scoring Points

With the West Bengal elections days away, three Trinamool Congress MPs gave their speeches on the Finance Bill in chaste Bengali. This seemed to become a sticking point, with Trinamool MP Arpita Ghosh telling BJP MPs to listen on their headphones if they wanted to understand. During a loud din at the end of her speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “I wish the opposition members have the patience to listen to the reply and if they have a problem, after I finish they may say what they want. Whereas when they kept preaching to us, I had the patience to listen to what they said, even though it was in Bengali.”

Security Protocol

Railway officials are not following instructions of wearing their government identity cards while in Rail Bhawan. So much so that the ministry has now had to issue an official communication, stating that Rail Bhawan is in a high-security zone in Central Vista and that the security protocol demands that every employee always wear their ID card while they are in the office building. Knowing that these instructions are ignored by many, security personnel have been directed to deny entry to officials who do not wear their ID cards.