UPPER HOUSE: AN ARCHETYPAl CASE OF lEGISlATIVE ElEPHANTIASIS
It is official: Odisha is the poorest State of the country because it doesn’t have a legislative Council! All sections of the people, particularly, ahem, the poor, demand its establishment at the earliest! Given the urgency to flesh out the details, we have no doubt that Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is the prophet of the idea and also its leading evangelist. He is the most animating force behind it. But the idea of legislative diarchy confirms the long-running suspicion that Patnaik is indeed what Prafulla Ghadai said: He is mentally and physically dull. He clearly lives in a parallel world if he thinks a legislative Council is all that our State needs to pull itself from the vicious riptide of poverty. Frankly, the country’s poorest State should not suffer a dunce like him a whit longer.
In the past, he has always been given the benefit of doubt because he personally never involved himself in anything so blatantly perverse. But now, we have got foolproof evidence of the obnoxious thought coming straight from his unhinged mind. Ramming down a prohibitively expensive and a wholly redundant Upper House down the throat of the people to fulfil his illusory objectives is downright crazy. When development expenditure gets more cuts than a butcher’s block, Patnaik should not even think of the idea, much less set about implementing it in double quick time.
The Government itself is subsisting on a financial drip-feed from the Centre and he himself goes to Delhi once every few months to rattle a tin can for alms. In such dire financial conditions, he should straightaway ignore the heavy breathers panting for an Upper House where they intend to simply potter around and age gracefully. Patnaik’s cronies will get their claws into taxpayers’ money by getting a share of the rides on the gravy train. The council will be a nest of the old fuddy-duddies still hanging around unemployed.
A large-scale rehabilitation of these deadwoods will be concealed under the oversized fig leaf of ‘full bicameral democracy’. His party’s PR minders are blitzing the airwaves banging the drum for this obnoxious idea. The chief drummer is none other than the mouthy spokesman, Pratap Deb. Deb’s rhetorical flourishes are always more impressive than the mishmash ideas he glibly spouts. Given his propaganda skills, Her Hitler had no problem in selecting him to head the Goebbelsian team to hard sell the idea that everyone knows is a relic of the bygone era.
The benefits of an Upper House are hideously sexed up by Deb. He makes surreal claims without even blinking his eyelids. The legislative Council is basically premised by him on a falsehood that it will bridge the democratic deficit in our State. Deploying flesh-crawling rhetoric, he strains every nerve to justify the ‘old age home’ on the ground that all the neglected sections of the society, from IT sectors to ousted shopkeepers, will find their voice in this august body! Everything is grist to a self-serving mill.
He is truly an expert in selling miracle cures of an Upper House. But, while heaping paeans of praise on Patnaik’s farsighted initiative, he wilfully glossed over the fact that the council, a new talking shop, will largely be a ceremonial body with no power on money Bills and a vexatious four months’ delaying power over other Bills. Nevertheless, newspaper reports on our variant of the House of lords a few days before the yearend whetted the craving of so many wannabe lords that they triggered a frenzied gold rush to the Naveen Nivas on the New Year to ingratiate themselves with the monarch well in advance.
WHAT THE NEW YEAR HOlDS FOR THEMIJ
With the Supreme Court yet to pronounce its verdict on the SIT investigation of the State’s mining scam and the CBI homing in on him and his confidants in the chit fund scams, it looks like 2015 will be annus horribilis for Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. He will not be allowed an easy getaway in the New Year. To keep his flock together in his hour of distress, he plans to shed his strenuously cultivated image of a fiscal conservative by embracing realpolitik on a real-time basis. He will indulge his worshipful followers in a legislative Council to be set up by him at a cost that will surely be an albatross around the State’s slender financial neck. 2015 will prove Patnaik to be a throwback, not a pioneer.
Prasad Harichandan
Will this fool-prove the angels wrongIJ How will the teenager Prasad Harichandan navigate the quicksands of Congress politicsIJ Reconciling the fatally irreconcilable differences within the party will drain away all the youthful energies of this starry-eyed idealist. All the life forms in his party belong to one camp or the other, with the invisible ‘remainder’ getting their inspiration from the extraterrestrial Rahul Gandhi. Patnaiks, Jenas and Biswals are genetically rooted in their deep-seated hostility against each other as if they are like cats in a sack. Harichandan knows there is as much team spirit in his party as there is in a bag of potato. That is why he always smiles and always whistles as if he is not bothered about the enemy within.
KV Singh Deo
like all third persons in marriages, BJP State president KV Singh Deo has always played on the boundaries of law and morality. The only other Odia to speak the language in a tortuous and wooden style he is linked to all the scandals currently running, Ghangapatna and discretionary allotments, etc., but preempts everyone in his demand for CBI enquiries into them. He genuinely mistakes this demand for his personal exoneration. He is a firm believer in the strategy ‘who shouts loudest and longest wins’. In any case, he is probably keeping the presidential seat warm for someone else, come January the 6th.
Damodar Rout
Has the blazing gun fallen silentIJ The motormouth of 2014 has zipped his eruptive mouth ever since the CBI hung Pyari Mohapatra out to dry late last year in the Seashore scam. Mohapatra’s blustery critic and the self-described truth-teller has simply disappeared without a trace. Has he finally found out the cure for his attention-deficit disorderIJ
Narasingha Mishra
Mishra was seen simpering his serial agreements whenever the young tearaways brayed about unity in the party on the day of Harichandan’s ascendancy to OPCC presidency. He knows the party’s core voters are deserting in droves. Yet, like someone in a cataleptic state, he can see the things and feel the things but can’t do anything to stop them from going bad. The teenagers in the party invoke the great god of Rahul in whatever they do to achieve their short-term objectives. The grizzled veteran knows he can’t be a pin-up for the new generation who mostly see him as someone over the hills. But the cocky blowhards should know that while enfeebled Mishra can’t fight for himself, he can kill others for the party.
Tara Prasad Bahinipati
The prorogation of the Assembly has taken the wind out of the sails of this indefatigable podium-climber. One of the most cherished spectacles of any Assembly session is the climbing of the Speaker’s podium by our big macho Tara Bahinipati. Problem arises when he thinks climbing is an end in itself. He has always a colourful way to make his point. His he-man style presupposes that orderly functioning of the House is a crashing waste of time. Viewers of his antics are thankful to him for giving them an idea, howsoever small, of what the Reichstag fires must have been some eighty years ago. But right now, in the absence of an Assembly session, he is like a turbine on a windless day. The gifted exhibitionist, however, can’t remain becalmed for long. In the New Year, Bahinipati will be even more of a testosterone-fuelled silverback than before.
EVEN THE ANIMAlS ARE DOUBlE-CROSSED BY OUR GOVERNMENT
There are few emotions as visceral as anger that comes from seeing, year after year, the Government’s pretensions in obeying the High Court orders to stop mass killing of animals in Balangir district. It makes a show of implementing the court order by clamping Section 144 in the area, deploying a large number of police force and even magistrates to issue instant orders to meet any eventuality. But the entire Government paraphernalia stands as a mute spectator as hundreds of animals and birds get slaughtered in a horrifying orgy. Was the Government machinery present at the site to ensure orderly butcheryIJ From whatever angle one looks at it, it is pure evil. Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s electorally inspired indifference to mass destruction of animals is simply mind-numbing. The principal ripple effect of the bloodbath was utter revulsion, not the death of the innocent animals.
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com. (M) 9437962121)