With the curtains coming down on reels of the year 2016, the BJD’s ‘2016 show’ has all the ‘elements’ of a potboiler for the public at large: violence, emotion and sex.
Interestingly, the ruling party naturally breaks into this potboiler mode given the protagonist (BJD) being only 19 years and apparently the teenage blues were manifested in a gargantuan way in this 2016 thriller show of the year. While the 2016 show opened up with violence (Paradip duel to Bargarh aggression), it later streamed into hysteric watery emotion (Mahanadi agitation) but to only end with a sleaze scene (alleged sex scandal of the BMC Mayor).
For the BJD, the year 2016 has definitely been the most tumultuous one in its history since birth. Even, the avalanches of 2015 that hurtled fast on to the party from Puri (Nabakalebar fiasco) via Cuttack (infant deaths) to Bargarh (farmer suicides) looked pale before 2016. The party, therefore, apparently looks stunned at the pace of the mazes in 2016 and has undergone the experience of what John Adams had once described "Politics are a labyrinth without a clue".
The reason: Tremors like Dana Majhi, Nagada and Encephalitis deaths shook the BJD Government up and down as the State once again slipped to the 1980s’ flashback age when it was in national and international headlines for abject poverty, malnutrition and a health system in coma. The shocking images of poor Dana Majhi carrying his wife’s corpse on his shoulders has even drawn a distressing comment from the then UN chief Ban Moon.
For most part of the year, the BJD was pulled into the vortex of teenage syndromes right from the Pajero kickbacks to the Motilal cohorts. Even, time was not in the BJD’s favour when innocent tribals were done to death in a police encounter at Gumudumaha in Kandhamal. And the collateral damage for the party gets propped up when the light was bang on the pitiable state of rural roads there and the State as a whole that posed a question mark over the Government’s development claims.
And, when the SUM fire singed the BJD Government’s credibility to near ashes, party supremo and CM Naveen Patnaik resorted to firefighting with the then Health Minister’s scalp.
Significant is a man of eminence like Winston Churchill had once said, “In war one could be killed once only; in politics one would be killed more than once”, and when a ruling party through its own doings hands over the firearm to the Opposition to trigger at it almost every day then upheaval stars loom large over the horizon in a democracy. And 2016 has exactly given that leeway to the Opposition against the BJD.
Though, however, "Finality is not the language of politics" as advocated by Benjamin Disraeli; what needs to be seen is how the law of Karma would go to unfold politically for the BJD in the run-up to the upcoming elections; and the year 2017 would only then rate the potboiler as a blockbuster or a thud.