The week seems to have stretched like chewing gum for the government. It began with some good news for the Congress. Senior BJP leader Gopinath Munde had rebelled over the weekend, demanding a better deal for himself within the BJP, which had become a difficult place for him after the death of his brother-in-law, Pramod Mahajan. This rebellion started off the week on a positive note for the Congress that gave all signs of recruiting Munde, and cocking a snook at the BJP. The AICC member in charge for Maharashtra, Mohan Prakash, met with Munde, a kind of comic relief to the party after a particularly trying week. All this also deflected attention from the fracas between the government and civil society (called Team Anna) over the Lokpal Bill.

The BJP, on its part, termed the rebellion a ?fidayeen attack? on itself. ?Just when we gain some traction as an opposition, a fidayeen attack has to happen,? said one office bearer ruefully. Last heard, Munde had placed impossible conditions for joining the Congress and, at the same time, placed even more impossible conditions for remaining in the BJP. By the time he met with Sushma Swaraj for a grand reconciliation, the sound bite brigade had moved on to more ?bugging? matters.

News broke that finance minister Pranab Mukherjee feared that his office was being bugged. Adhesive substances had been found by sleuths of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) when they did a sweep of Pranabda?s rooms. Would this be India?s Watergate, as Sushma Swaraj put it on Twitter, or was this just another conspiracy theory in a season of conspiracy theories? Poor Munde lost the limelight to chewing gum and a million speculations over the state of the Union Cabinet.

As a happy BJP leader, just back from a summer sojourn abroad, put it, ?It?s irrelevant now whether Munde stays or goes; what is most important is to find out ki Pranabda ke office main chewing gum kisne chipkay? (Who stuck chewing gum in Pranabda?s office?)? Just past the mid-week hump, the weekend seems far away for the government.

nistula.hebbar@expressindia.com