WHY are our trains burning so frequently and so regularly? Is there some kind of a conspiracy against the Railways and the Railway Minister Nitish Kumar? Or is it the culmination of the utter inefficiency and dereliction of duty by the Railway bureaucracy? This time bogies of the Purushottam Express statationed in the yard in Delhi caught fire. One could say that it was some kind of luck in which the bogies were burnt but no lives were lost. It was the third incident of a train catching fire in the last three months and the fifth case of a burning train this year.

Earlier there were cases of fire breaking out in Brahmaputra Mail and Delhi-Shamli Passenger train also. Nitish Kumar could cry foul and call the cases of burning trains as part of a continuous conspiracy against him by his political opponents or simply dismiss these as accidents because of short circuits. But even his friends and admirers have now started wondering that why did not the minister, so much in possessive love with his railway portfolio and so quick in dealing with political manoeuvres, take action that would be convincing whether the cases of burning trains were caused by elements of mischief or misgovernance?

If rail travel in the country has to become a constant nightmare, surely the minister will not be allowed to sleep peacefully over it. The message of the burning trains seems to be clear: Wake up Mr. Minister or you will get badly derailed.

There are murmurs within the Delhi BJP ranks about the future of former Chief Minister Madan Lal Khurana who won the election for the Delhi Assembly but could not lead his party to a Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh like victory against the Congress strong-woman Sheila Dikshit. No doubt the BJP, which had 14 MLAs only in the last assembly, has now 20 as this election was fought under the leadership of Khurana. But the fact remained that BJP failed to storm the Congress citadel in Delhi and making people wonder why the results of the post-poll surveys in most states had gone topsy turvey.

The BJP insiders feel that if the poll management in Delhi too had in the hands of Arun Jailtey or Vijay Goel, the results in Delhi too might have been different.

Khurana is now being tipped to join the ranks of "elder statesmen" within the party, like Kusha Bhau Thakeray and Vijay Kumar Malhotra. The whisper telegraph said that he would be offered the governorship of Pondicherry now vacant since the demise of the former incumbent. Will he accept the offer or will he not? Because accepting it would be tantamount to being sent out of Delhi to a distant assignment and another level of political life.

AN important indicator emerging stronger from the Mizoram poll is that in the Christian North East, Congress is losing ground and the BJP is failing to open an account. The Mizo National Front had chipped in with the National Democratic Alliance led by Atal Behari Vajpayee. And the NCP sharp shooter P. Sangma had driven away the Hindu vote out of the Congress bag. There is a drive for ousting Congress from other North Eastern states except Assam. What happened in Mizoram could happen in the days to come in other states from Sikkim to Tripura. It seems the seven sisters are being made to snap their umbilical chord. The sign was that many new leaders would emerge in the days to come in the North East. The remnants of the Congress citadel can also fall. Congress, beware.

THE case of the Bihar Director General of Police, D P Ojha, once considered the blue-eyed boy of the protagonist of Ram Rajya -- the Bihar style, the one and only Laloo Prasad Yadav was getting curiouser and curiouser. The controversy was abuzz about whether he had resigned or he was sacked by Chief Minister Rabri Devi. People in Bihar, as is the tradition in the State, were sharply divided. There were Laloo-loyalists who honestly believed that Ojha was sacked because he tried to run a parallel government in Bihar and had defied the Chief Minister.

There were others who said that the officer had resigned in protest against the intolerable corruption levels in the State to carry on a campaign to ‘clean-up Bihar’. If Rabri had sacked her husband’s once-favourite policeman, she must have had her reasons. And if Ojha had decided to resign in defiance of the Laloo Raj, considered by Laloo’s ardent admirers as the New Ram Rajya then he too must have his reasons. On whose side is Laloo? No doubt on Rabri side, for he had said that Ojha should have and must have listened to Rabri. When Laloo-loyalist, Bihar Minister Shivnandan Prasad Tewari, tried to portray Ojha as the new Ravana at a public meeting to defend the Rabri Rajya, strangely chappals began to fly at the stage as people’s response.

The minister had to quickly retreat from the public stage and seek a place of safety for a considerable time behind a heap of books at the nearby book festival. There seemed to be a lot of confusion in people’s mind. The question was: Who is trying to burn whose Lanka?

BJP president Vankaiah Naidu, at the moment of his triumph with his party’s stunning performance in Rajasthan, Madhhya Pradesh and Chhattisgrah, felt trapped with a ladoo in his mouth when suggestions started buzzing that he was "very tired" and must go to Nellore for some rest. When he went to share a ladoo of victory with Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, he must have been reassured when the smiling PM quipped "who wants him to rest?"

The BJP poll battle for the state assemblies was earlier expected to be led by Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani but the responsibility ultimately devolved on Venkaiah Naidu’s favourite brigade of young new leaders like Arun Jaitley and Pramod Mahajan. Will the BJP president get busy to lead the campaign for Lok Sabha 2004 or return to the Union Cabinet to make room for a younger BJP president? It is an open question.

THE fall of Ajit Jogi in the dramatic political tragedy of the Congress in Chhattisgarh has made many poll analysts wonder who defeated whom and how? Despite the Dilip Singh Judeo affair, Ajit Jogi emerged as a fallen god. And how did Raman Singh rise as a BJP star to don the chief ministerial robes? Mystery seemed to have been solved by some insiders of Chhattisgrah affairs, who tried to figure out why the once Congress strong-man of Madhya Pradesh and Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet minister during the traumatic Emergency, Vidya Charan Shukla, was seen with a big grin on his face?