In a hole, over the mole

REGIONAL ROUNDUP

BJP leader Jaswant Singh has hardly been in the news in the manner that other colleagues have been, but his role in the mole episode have seen him featuring regularly in newspapers across the country. In the north, for days, he was on the front page of Hindi dailies like Dainik Bhaskar, Dainik Jagran, and Punjab Kesri. When the PMO said Singh had not named the mole, contrary to his asssertion that he had, it was the day's lead in the Punjab Kesri. The previous two days, it was either the second or the third lead. Both the Jagran and Bhaskar had boxes on how the issue had become a problem for Singh, but neither wrote editorials criticising Singh as some others did. Rajasthan Patrika did an edit, but that argued that while there had been talk of a US mole earlier, the names had always been suppressed. Patrika had a small box on page one on the US embassy's reactions to the letter released by Singh in Parliament.

In most Kannada dailies, the stories of the alleged mole in the PMO's office during Narasimha Rao's reign received front page coverage. Market leader Vijaya Karnataka carried the developments as front page lead for consecutive days. It even ran an editorial questioning issues relating to national security. Another leading daily Praja Vani, in its editorial, criticised Jaswant Singh for raising the issue without substantial evidence. "That such an allegation came from a senior leader of the BJP is not just surprising, but shocking as well. Jaswant Singh has failed to come up with any evidence linking to the presence of the mole," it said. Kannada Prabha, however, tackled the issue as a routine matter and attributed much of the controversy to the BJP's attitude of 'jumping the gun'.

All the three leading Telugu newspapers "" Eenadu, Vaartha and Andhra Jyothi "" gave meagre coverage to former External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh's claim that a mole in the Rao government had leaked India's nuclear secrets to the US. All the issues surrounding Singh's controversial statement "" including his refusal to disclose the name of the mole, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh daring him to name the person who he claimed was a mole, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) spewing fire on the former minister "" were restricted to two column stories and were relegated to the inside pages.