Just when you thought things couldn't get more ludicrous……

Our amazing Government has been setting new standards in getting quotable. And, if in recent times, honchos of Atal Behari Vajpayee's ragtag combination were contriving to tie themselves up in knots after the event, now they seem to be denying themselves even before they've actually been quoted.

Taking the lead, as usual, is Information and Broadcasting Minister Pramod Mahajan, who recently appeared on a talk show that was to be recorded and telecast at a later date. On persistent grilling by host Vir Singhvi, Pramod, at one point, mumbled the date ``April 6''. That date being significant because that was apparently the first occasion upon which the Prime Minister became aware of the intrusions in Kargil, whereas till now, the story handed out is that the truth only dawned in May.

But a day later, Pramod's office was hurriedly issuing clarifications that the date was actually May 6; and that the Minister's tongue had slipped. Unfortunately for Mahajan, his tongue seems to have slipped twice on the same programme, so he may just end up eating his words, or his denial. Of course, this show was on an independent television channel, if it had been on Prasar Bharti, such clarification would not have been necessary, a censor's scissors would have sufficed.

If Mahajan was busy denying himself blue, another luminary's reported statement had to be countered, er…denied, by the Ministry of External Affairs, which, unreliable sources say, has a new Department for Denial of Ministers' Statement.

And, that new Department, codenamed DimWit, was specially created as the South Block mandarins were kept overly busy by the adroit George Fernandes, who changes his statement every time he makes one.

Here are some of the beauts that Fernandes has come up with: ``China is enemy no.1'', ``safe passage'', ``the Subrahmanyam Committee will not look into intelligence failure'', among a gaggle of others.

Take the question of ``safe passage'', that the MEA had to studiously deny while George was issued gag orders. Then, the one about his interview to Karan Thapar about China being India's ``potential enemy no.1''. While Fernandes' Woman Friday Jaya Jaitley has argued that he never actually said that during that interview, the point is that the day prior to the recording of that particular episode, Fernandes described China as ``enemy no. 1'' at a public lecture in Delhi.

Then, in another sense, is this one about his bete noire, former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat. One of the charges leading up to the Admiral's sacking was that in 1983-84, while commanding the INS Ranjit in the Arabian Sea, he had ordered warning shots upon Pakistani aircraft when they had repeatedly crept into Indian territory. That conduct, Fernandes felt, was ``irresponsible''. For some reason, Fernandes has not applied a similar logic to the shooting down of the Pakistani Atlantique nearabout the Rann of Kutch.

Finally, of course, we must return to the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Brajesh Mishra, who once again brings in the China motif to our discourse in denial. While speaking at the release of India's draft nuclear doctrine, he referred to the threat of ``nuclear blackmail'' by China, something immediately denied by the MEA soon after.