A cascade of good news for Naveen Patnaik
last week, the flow of good news for Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik looked unstoppable. First, a petition challenging the CBI Special Court’s decision not to summon him as an accused in the case relating to coal block allocation to Hindalco was summarily dismissed by the Supreme Court. In fact, the apex court read the riot act to the petitioner for filing a frivolous and vexatious petition and imposed a fine of one lakh rupees on him. Second, another petition for the Supreme Court-monitored CBI probe into the chit fund scam was also rejected by the top court, fortuitously on the same day. As if courtroom good news was not enough, Patnaik was ranked by the mass-circulated India Today as the most popular among all the Chief Ministers of the country. He also received from the Central Government an allocation of Rs 1,743 crore which was far north of his expectations.
The icing on the cake, however, was his 8-0 whitewash of the Opposition in the civic polls which proved, for the umpteenth time, that he is a colossus bestriding the electoral map of the State (more of that below). The stream of good news had the entire Opposition and their assorted co-thinkers in the media running for cover. The pesky social activists and their political bedfellows have all fallen into a quagmire from which they are unlikely to gain traction anytime soon. For the time-being at least, their endless soap opera campaign against Patnaik has run out of steam. Even the generalissimo of Congress party’s strategy and the Poet laureate of UPA’s land Acquisition Bill Jairam Ramesh looked like babbling banalities in the city on a day that clearly belonged to Patnaik. His strenuous efforts to paint him as a double-crossing weasel were seen going down the drain.
Opp parties looked like blank-eyed zombies in the civic polls
The bloodiness of the bloody nose BJD supremo Naveen Patnaik delivered to the Opposition parties in the last week’s civic polls was the sheer scale of their defeat. They have been smashed to pieces. Patnaik produced yet another masterclass in the art of electoral politics. It was a copybook triumph for him. It looked like the game was not played at all; it was a walkover for him. He has displayed his enormous people connect and appeal. The full failure of the Opposition parties has been thoroughly exposed. Results have proved that they are as popular among the voters as a root canal surgery. like startled rabbits caught in the floodlights of Patnaik’s popularity, they all ended up as roadkills.
Both the parties have been bearded in their own dens. The BJP in north-western Odisha and the Congress in the southern extremities of the State where they had some strength and campaigned extensively have been literally gutted. The severe shellacking they received clearly indicates they are cut loose of any moorings binding them to the people. They meekly surrendered like cowardly cockroaches. The glorious freedom of total loss bred irresponsible behaviour in them. As if they had no sense of shame, they brayed utter nonsense that the BJD’s money and muscle power was responsible for their defeat. One has got to admire their bare-faced cheek.
Naveen Patnaik’s popularity and Odisha’s poverty - an explainer
The sheer geographical spread of the BJD’s landslide victory in the civic polls is a clear pointer to Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s glowing popularity even after 15 years of his uninterrupted reign. He seems to have alchemised anti-incumbency disadvantage into a cast-iron vote-winner. But one thing is clear: he wins elections by cannily understanding how to win elections. His strategy is to touch the hearts of the millions of the poor people through an assortment of people-pleasing low-cost welfare schemes. Poor Odisha doesn’t have sufficient middleclass and aspirational voters to understand Patnaik’s self-serving politics of jam today for the poor. Patnaik doesn’t believe in investing in the future. His mantra is immediate gratification of the poor people’s wants, not their permanent interests. He knows how to cash in on their poverty.
His success lies in keeping them becalmed in their present condition while making them happy with crumbs thrown at them at regular intervals. He invents pro-poor schemes even when there is no need for them and the funds cry for better use elsewhere. Poor people gobble up these placebos, mistaking them to be medicines for their economic sickness. His popularity is derived from the poor people constantly looking for his beneficence. He has a vested interest in keeping them poor. They are his core constituency, his solid vote bank. He will not unclench his vice-like grip over them. He will bequeath the future generation the poorest state he is presiding over for years and years without any foreseeable end.
His total disregard for the State’s infrastructural development - the only way to achieve economic progress at a faster rate - is like removing the rungs from the ladder so that people can’t climb it. They will remain forever trapped in poverty. A state superabundantly rich in coal suffers from crippling power cuts outside the Cuttack-Bhubaneswar beltway. A State heavenly blessed with rivers has negligible lands under irrigation. A large portion of whatever little capital expenditure is budgeted for remains unspent. His crazy plan to build pucca houses for all in five years will drain away precious Rs 20,000 crore so desperately needed to shore up the crumbling infrastructure and build badly needed new ones. The State continues to remain a vast infrastructure-deficit wilderness. If infrastructure doesn’t improve, the State is doomed to poverty. Poverty is being deliberately perpetuated because it is the seedbed of Patnaik’s popularity. Poverty feeds his popularity. There is an intimate symbiotic relationship between Patnaik and the poor. It is not rocket science any more.
Who is in charge of the cityIJ
Why must misery dog us at every turnIJ The cause of all miseries is the drainage system now under construction in the city. It is not so much the work as the deathly slow pace of it. The work is progressing so messily that it provides us a graphic illustration of what is contemptuously referred to as the Third World. In many parts of the city, roads have been dug so deep that gorge-like conditions have been created at places teeming with thousands of people. Busy roads have been ripped open throwing traffic into utter chaos. Road rages are a common sight. For weeks and even months together, work remains abandoned, prolonging dreadful traffic mayhem. As collateral damage, monstrous digging machines frequently tear apart the telephone lines. Internet connections are dead for weeks. Banks and ATMs are dysfunctional for long hours due to link failure.
BSNl blames it on the scorched earth approach of the drainage-implementing agency. Who is really in charge of the cityIJ Whosoever he may be, he certainly treats the citizens as lowlife scum. It is pus seeping out of a city in awful decay. Even ordinary road construction work is delayed for months for no goddam reason and oftentimes looks completely abandoned. Sharp stone chips and the toxic dust coming from crushed gravel make us wonder if we were not better off with previous roads. Roads ruthlessly freed from encroachments are waiting for eternity for start of the work to widen them. But mounds of sand and stone chips are dumped on them for months. The whole situation looks like a total car crash. On top of it, comes the news that the schedule of completion of the drainage project has been deferred yet again as if it is an open-ended project. Translation: there is no foreseeable end to our slow-motion misery. The main ripple effect of this ghastly disarray is the total disgust with the verminous ruling class, not the inconvenience.
(saratpattanayak@hotmail.com (M) 9437962121)