JAYADEV JENA IS OF AS MUCH USE AS A CHOCOlATE TEAPOT
like rats eating each other on a doomed ship, the feckless leaders of the Congress party in the State are once again at each other’s throat. It looks like the party has lost its will to live. The party can never attain its former glory because the power of its groups is greater than the power of the party. Rather than a united party, it is a loose confederation of various independent groups. For proof, look at the gathering convened last week by Hemanand Biswal and 13 MlAs going to Delhi to campaign for change of leadership in the State. The ambitions of many of its subprime leaders are always several steps ahead of their talents. The Congress has a massive undersupply of selfless and dedicated leaders. It is an ageing and shrinking party. It is wallowing in the quagmire of un-electability for many years now. It currently lies somewhere between dire straits and dead. It requires a leap of imagination to visualise that the present PCC Chief Jayadev Jena or any of his ilk can pull the party back from the brink. They can never Botox life into the comatose party. Jena is a proven failure. He is a politically-challenged moron. After the last electoral defeats in both the Assembly and lok Sabha elections, he is of as much use as a chocolate teapot. His personal and political ratings are in freefall and he has become parody of a leader. leader of the legislative wing of the party, normally the presumptive claimant to be Chief Minister in case the party wins a majority has declared his intention not to contest election hereafter. In this near-death situation, the party badly needs a lifeline. The Congress high command must stop it from careening towards oblivion.
JB IS NOT RETIRING; HE IS RElOADING
The arrival of JB Patnaik on the scene adds a new dimension to the equation. Janaki Ballav Patnaik (JB) used to be a phrase, but now he is a paragraph. He was president of the Youth Congress, a prominent editor of an influential newspaper, a member of the Standing Committee of the All-India Newspaper Editors’ Conference and of the Sahitya Academy of Odisha, a Cabinet Minister, a three-time Chief Minister, Congress Working Committee member, leader of Opposition, Odisha Pradesh Congress chief, Governor of Assam, author of many books and an outstanding litterateur. His detractors can rabbit on to their heart’s content that the party’s current misery is a sorry epitaph to JB’s Chief Ministership for 13 long years. But JB still stands head and shoulders above the present crop of washed-up third-raters in the party. He is regarded as the oracle on the State’s politics. He still glows even after the past five years of gubernatorial aloofness from politics. In the present state of affairs in the party, he will be an asset beyond price. Given the limited shelf life of modern politicians, his decades of dominance in the party are a tribute to his political longevity. To give the credit he is due, it must be said he still retains the stardust at 87 years of age when most political leaders elsewhere would be preparing for the other life. All the ridiculous song and dance about JB being a divisive figure in the Congress is self-serving propaganda. Dominated by an oligopoly of third-rate and value-free politicians, the State Congress badly needs a wise, foresighted and shrewd leader like JB to lift it from the knackers’ yard. He is a proven turnaround artist who should be allowed to breathe life into the moribund party. He can see further into the future and reshape the party into a fighting force. With his political experience and insight, he can unify all the implacably opposite interests in the stricken party. He alone can lead the Congress fight against the longest-lived economic misrule of Naveen Patnaik that has kept the State poorest among all the 29 States. At the same time, at his advanced age, he can’t play the role of a rescuer like the Batman to airlift the Congress from its present morass. The role of a mentor will be more appropriate for him. But the ageist Rahul Gandhi may have other ideas.
KIIT IN THE CROSSHAIRS
A news channel is stalking the KIIT so intensely that reporting about its activities has become a permanent branch of its news gathering. Its monomaniacal obsession and one-eyed coverage of the educational institution is sickening. Over-the-top attempts of the so-called flame-carrier of fearless journalism to discredit KIIT founder Achyuta Samanta are grating on the nerves of the viewers. In the fevered imagination of the channel, Samanta is an unscrupulous opportunist always on the lookout for lands to expand his educational empire, which he denies vehemently and the Government probably finds no merit in the allegations for a probe. Nobody is saying Samanta should not face the full force of law for any wrongdoing. But park prejudices for a minute and just concentrate on what Samanta has done for promotion of quality education. The KIIT has undergraduate and postgraduate courses in engineering, medicine, law, management, IT and a host of other disciplines which together make it a comprehensive university in one campus. The university is in the limca Book of Records as an institution of educational excellence. But the TV anchor continues to spew his psychobabble. He can’t see these obvious landmark achievements which others can plainly see. By whipping up gaseous clouds of spurious stories over the KIIT’s irregular land acquisitions and other wrongdoings, he has plunged the channel to an all-time journalistic depth. Assembling a group of toxic anti-Samanta bigots, the channel almost daily beasts the KIIT and its founder Samanta for sucking up land like a giant Hoover. The self-described analysts handpicked by the channel cut themselves loose from any moorings binding them to truth and, in slow-motion butchery, cut the man and the institution to thousands of pieces. Samanta is made to look like the most wanted person alive. The channel howls like a banshee that the KIIT is a real estate company masquerading as an educational institution. It is acting more like a campaigner than a news dispenser. Its hysterical shrieking is a wonder to behold. Rigour and rectitude in journalism have all sunk beneath a foaming sea of self-interest and hidden agenda. The channel’s objective is, they like us to believe, to speak truth onto power. The blustery denigration of the KITT brings to mind its parent channel’s alleged demand of Rs 100 crore from an industrial group and the arrest of two of its senior journalists by the Delhi Police on charges of extortion. Need we say anything moreIJ
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com.
(M) 9437962121)