ASSEMBlY SESSION’S EPIlEPTIC SEIZURE
The Congress and the BJP deployed the full panoply of their members’ belligerence to disrupt the Assembly on all the 14 days it was in session. They literally behaved like a lynch mob, braying for Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s blood. Granting that chronic bickering between the Government and the Opposition is part of their class war, both of them, in the instant case, so arrogantly stuck to their stands that as the crisis was getting bigger, the leaders were getting smaller all the time. Premature closure of the session should be a lesson on how proceedings should be conducted but seldom are. Neither the leader of the House nor the leader of Opposition had the requisite stardust to sway the other. It is a palpable sense of disappointment that both lacked a certain stature to generate confidence in each other. Saroj Sahu’s interrogation by the CBI reinforced the Opposition’s self-deception that Patnaik’s fall was round the corner. Its maniacal obsession to be livelier and noisier seemed to be an end in itself. In their holy battle for discussion on the chit fund scam, they never realised how close they were to the iceberg of indefinite adjournment. Things move forward with engagement, not confrontation. The Government never unclenched its fist and the Opposition never blinked. Result: the session seized up.
DISRUPTION PROVIDED SPEAKER INAlIENABlE EXCUSES TO ADJOURN
The way the Assembly was running, rather not running, its adjournment sine die was only a matter of time. A mere whiff of trouble always gave Speaker Niranjan Pijari the inalienable excuse to adjourn the House for long hours. There were several options available to him for running the House. But one option that was not available was to adjourn it frequently and for long periods. That paved the way for an indefinite adjournment with 12 working days still left. Someone even with a half-formed conscience would be aghast at the colossal waste of Rs 50 lakh of taxpayers’ money on each of the 14 days it lay paralysed. The Speaker’s faith on the Advocate General’s opinion almost verged on the religious and he thought disintegration of the proceedings was too small a price. Damodar Rout said pertinently as a concerned citizen but unwisely as a Minister that the Speaker was not discharging his responsibility properly even though he was sufficiently empowered to do so under the Constitution. Dante had warned us that the hottest places in the hell are reserved for those who, in times of great crisis, maintain their indifference. Did we not sleepwalk into that crisisIJ The Speaker should have cut the cancer of mayhem with the simple scalpel of discipline. For long 14 days, he stood impassive as if he was posing for an oil portrait. Why, oh why, did he not perform his basic duty of running the HouseIJ He should have spread calm and poured oil on the troubled waters. But he preferred to sit on his hands. His handling of the session will remain a poisoned chalice. That is for sure.
NARASINGHA MISHRA: RUNNING UP A DOWN ESCAlATOR
leader of Opposition Narasingha Mishra appears a forlorn figure. During the entire session, he bleated pathetically about how the Chief Minister had been at his arrogant worst in ignoring the Opposition. He plaintively appealed for reconsideration of the Speaker’s ruling of no-discussion on the chit fund scam. But the Speaker made his stand of ‘no reconsideration’ loud and clear, without any ifs and buts. On top of it, when the business rules were amended to curtail the number of days the House must sit in a year, he could not hear the bell tolling loudly for an abrupt and indefinite adjournment. Mishra stands prostrate as the enforced closure of the Assembly session has taken the wind out of his sails. He knows he leads a fratricidal party with its fissiparous leaders at each other’s throat. His opponents may be in the rival parties but his enemies are within his own. Some of his colleagues have quipped he neither led nor followed but only obstructed. His problem was he could not dismount the tiger he was riding on. Had he participated in the House proceedings, it would have been construed as death without martyrdom. At his age, it is difficult for him to learn how to strike hard. For an understated man like him, bare-knuckle fight is not his natural habitat. Even then, he thought he would not be fulfilled as leader of Opposition if he could not force a discussion on the chit fund scam. But Mishra-watchers say if he was so convinced about the righteousness of his demand, why did he not sit on fastIJ That would have changed the weather.
DAMODAR ROUT: A JANUS-FACED WEASEl
No ingenuity known to mortals can stop Damodar Rout’s ever-eruptive mouth from talking tosh. He has never been one to let prudence get in the way of a good sound-bite. You can call him many things but certainly not cautious. He is so reckless that even his roly-poly body oozes recklessness. Indiscretion is to him what profit is to a businessman. If someone believed that he had restrained himself after being admonished by the Chief Minister for his highly impertinent remarks about the Government’s patronage of Seashore, he was soon disabused. After a brief lull, he relapsed into his old naughty self last week with his comments on the Speaker’s failure to run the Assembly properly. The remarks were a shocking own goal as the Speaker was doing what the Government had wanted him to do. Rout’s detractors saw his irresponsible remarks as an act of insurrection. The BJD must learn how to handle this tactical nuclear weapon carefully. He, of course, employed weasel words to twist what he had actually said before the camera. The pompous blowhard has always taken the public for mugs. He thinks people are fools with a mental age of five and an attention span of one day only. He has always relied on the public’s wiped memories. But his sinuous u-turns, fatally for him, make mockery of his credibility. Has deceit been ever more grotesqueIJ
ASIRBAD BEHERA: FAll OF A CUTTACK lANDMARK
The generalissimo of Odisha sports, Asirbad Behera, has become too smart for his own good. long suzerainty over the Odisha Olympic Association and the more cash-rich Odisha Cricket Association enticed him to embark on a course of aggrandisement and enrichment for him and his family. The result: full speed over the cliff. Behera and his son are being hotly pursued by the CBI for their involvement in the Artha Tatwa chit fund scam. Both have been called several times for interrogation over funds diversion from the AT Group to the sports bodies they represent. Now comes the Barabati land encroachment charge against the senior Behera’s fiefdom, Odisha Olympic Association. Grabbing Government land, constructing buildings over it and renting them out to make fast bucks is nothing but gangsterism. The more we learn of the web of malpractices on the part of this father-son duo and their ever-dependable cohorts the worse it gets. Sports lovers are downhearted by Behera’s unsporting activities done purely to expand his reach and influence. Behera is evasive and woolly over his links with the AT Group. But on the issue of land grabbing, his operation will not surprise anyone outside his cosy little circle. After the damning High Court verdict, he needs to butt out as soon as he can. Sports bodies need squeaky-clean persons with fully paid-up commitment to pure sports and not Behera-like characters who operate on the margins of law and propriety. We don’t need someone who between his moneymaking preoccupations also devotes a little time for promotion of sports. The bloody nose delivered by the High Court should be the signal for the window of Behera’s hegemony over sports to close.
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com. (M) 9437962121)