Odisha’s BJD has been voted to power a dramatic fourth term. The party stole 217 seats! Fertile brains in several walks of life point to the little ‘plaything’ called EVM which has been conclusively proven to be an easily maneuverable slave machine. But nothing can be proven. The Congress is a mere name with a miniscule group of self-centric people perpetually at war against one another.
The BJP was undermined by Odisha voters despite the dramatically rising popularity of Modi across the country. The BJD has been immensely fortunate. Everything that churns money happened during the last 14 years — incredible mining boom and indiscriminate private investment from reputed corporate houses though most of them are weeping now for lack of the promised support and backup. Posco is still nowhere near reality after billions sunk and years wasted.
Vedanta is bleeding from head to toe because of the callous attitude of State officials and politicians. It is true that Vedanta was a bit too ambitious on its Puri ‘International University’ project. It wanted a whopping 10,000 acres of prime land. Opposition leaders provoked the local residents to agitate and the company lost on all fronts. A silly mistake in the ‘trust deed’ it used to acquire land cost it the irreparable damage. But Vedanta’s aluminum plant at lanjigarh has taken the worst beating for no fault of the company’s. local people, having been incited by some NGOs said ‘No’. Subsequently, the environment authorities too put their foot down. No raw material can ever be made available to the company that has already drained 400 billion rupees into the project only after tall promises of help came from the State. Thousands of villagers, mainly tribal communities, have been displaced. Now, there is no job, and livelihood crises would keep haunting them for generations to come. The aluminum project is gasping for breath without raw materials. For Vedanta’s Jharsuguda smelter plant, the woe is even more terrible. Power generated at the captive power plants cannot be used for its manufacturing units only because of a pre-agreed condition of supplying the entire energy to the State. The smelter plant too is slowly slipping into a coma. The State’s energy wing is plain callous to the grave issue. The authorities are glued to the agreement clause, no matter if the company operations close and thousands of poor people go jobless. The cool media seems to have ignored the humanitarian aspects of the Vedanta story. Successive Energy Ministers and officials have never worried to find ways out, at least to save the poor people from going hungry and homeless, irrespective of what happened to the company.
The BJD-controlled State was one of the first to ban that terrible carcinogenic thing called ‘Gutkha’, which hooks the user after only a couple of encounters and reaps incalculable riches for the manufacturers. Gutkha use is like the most virulent malaria parasite that kills highest number of human creatures across the world (AIDS scourge lags far behind). The State Government banned public sale of Gutkha. The Gutkha lobby went to court. And lo, who should rush to their defence but a BJD leader. One can get truckloads of the deadly material anytime anywhere despite the ban even today.
There is a permanent joker in the BJD pack called Prasanna Patsani, who calls Naveen names when he imagines the CM is no hero and then falls at the latter’s feet calling him the ‘greatest of all’, the moment he smells trouble. He is also a self-styled tantric, who has mastered the art of misleading people. He waves a wand to hypnotise people in vain. A fair enough Odia poet, Patsani was once accused of having rented out a portion of his Delhi MP residence to a thug. The thug was nabbed and Patsani got into trouble. The media did not carry the story well enough. No one is able to make out how this ‘joker in the pack’ steals a ticket every election season.
Pradip Amaat is now the Finance Minister. He has declared to be a professional ‘social worker helping the poor’ in the nomination documents. His hobby is also social work and past time is dedicated to the poor. But nowhere does he say he has been exposed to activities related to finance to render him fit for Finance Minister. He had not played his role as the Speaker as expected, particularly when Ranendra Pratap Swain was cheated by his protégé Ramesh Rout. Damodar Rout the amusingly talkative character has been belittled by the boss. A good party spokesperson, an able parliamentarian and a seasoned Minister, he is now expected to procure, guard and distribute liquor of all kinds. The boss has been guided wrongly by public officials. There is a great deal of murmur that the State mechanism has a very dirty underbelly. The BJD boss does not seem to bother.
What agitates the mind the most is the fact that the CM keeps clinging to the portfolios of Home, Water Resources and General Administration ever since he became the boss, as if no other mortal in the crowd is fit enough to manage those departments. The ‘cleanest’ Chief Minister would do better by sharing power among his lieutenants. Or else face rebellion one fine morning when not a soul would be willing to stand behind him. Public officials too will disappear too willingly. They are only expected to show the executive the best paths by displaying the rulebook and putting the foot down when the political boss gets unruly and erring. But they say in Odisha there is no democracy; there is only a bureaucracy. That is cheating the masses because they never voted the civil servants to power.
(The writer is a core member of Transparency International, Odisha)