From Nagpur, with 'love'

Mr Mukherjee's rambling discourse on history and the Constitution would find few takers even among his own erstwhile party-men

Nagpur was the dead centre of undivided India. The British set up a zero-mile marker there. Although the present-day centre of India is a degree north and a degree east of it in remote Madhya Pradesh, for a brief while last week the Maharashtra city was the epicentre of political India, thanks to a meeting there between two ageing gentlemen, one past his even titular prime and the other very much at the apogee of his influence.  We were treated to two discourses on live television, one delivered in Marathi-accented but fluent Hindi, the other in Bengali-accented and stumbling English.