At last the Congress provides entertainment.

Great excitement in the Lok Sabha yesterday when the Congress went ahead and presented a bill which will divide Andhra Pradesh into Telengana and Seemandhra. The excitement was provided by Congress MPs who fought each other, prompting the Speaker to suspend 16, not all of them from the Congress. One Congress MP, L Rajagopal has been expelled from the party for using a pepper spray to add some zing to the protests, leading to jokes about ' pepperazzi ' on the internet. Some feel that cyanide spray would have been more effective in clearing sinuses. One fellow apparently drew a knife but we are not told its size or sharpness or whether it was made in China. Although they claim to be equal to men in everything women seem to be singularly lacking in the melee. They should not object if they are labeled the ' gentler sex ' as of today. But why were Congress fellows fighting each other a couple of months before elections? A Times Now-CVoter poll gives the Congress just 6 seats in Andhra in the coming elections whereas in 2009 it bagged the largest number, at 33 seats, from the state. By dividing the state the Congress hopes to get a large chunk of the 17 seats in Telengana at the cost of the remaining 25 in the Seemandhra region. Telengana was ruled by the Nizam of Hyderabad and so has a high concentration of ' minorities '. With every other pseudo-secular party competing for minority votes the Congress calculates that this move will help it to get a substantial chunk of such votes and, along with other Telengana supporters help it to win more than the 6 seats that opinion polls are projecting. To that extent it has nominated Mr Digvijay Singh to manage its campaign in Andhra. It all becomes clear when we remember that this is the man who blamed the death of Hemant Karkare, Chief of the Anti-Terror Squad in Mumbai who sacrificed his life fighting the Pakistani terrorists on 26 November 2008, on Hindu militants, which makes him guilty of treason. He also continues to claim that the Batla House encounter was faked despite a Delhi court convicting Shazad Ahmed of the Indian Mujahiddin for the incident. Knife, pepper spray, traitor, this is the stuff of Bollywood films. Who says the Congress is a party of boot-licking, criminal-hugging, miserable tyrants? It can be a joke as well. What fun!