Outwardly mischievous Owaisi seems to be a sensible lawmaker who taught many of our MPs a hard lesson in the Parliament by closing his oath-taking act with chants of ‘Jai Bhim, JaiTakbeer, Allahhu Akbar and ‘Jai Hind’ amid the loud ‘Jai Shri Ram' slogan by the saffron majority. Perhaps with a view to drowning Owaisi's voice and demoralising him just for the heck of it. 'Jai Shri Ram' is constitutionally inappropriate as the chant is thoroughly unsecular. Any particular faith slogan is legally inappropriate in the Indian Parliament.
A video has gone viral on social media. Twitter users have fittingly slammed the MPs, calling an act shameful and terming it as ‘bullying’.
“This is Parliament of a secular republic where an MP from a minority community is being bullied with slogans. Imagine what these bigots would do with a common Muslim,” a user reacted to the video.
Owaisi won by a margin of 2,82,186 votes in his home turf in the recent Lok Sabha polls against BJP’s Dr Bhagwanth Rao. He has been re-elected for a fourth consecutive term from Hyderabad. Addressing a public meeting recently, Owaisi had pointed out that Muslims have equal rights in the country. "Muslims are his sedaar (shareholder) and not kirayedaar (tenants) in India. They are equal citizens of this country and they can't be denied the rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution."
Similarly, no matter how devout a leader is about the Hindu Lord Jagannath, he or she cannot chant ‘Jai Jagannath' in public as this would mean the leader is typicallyagainst the spirit of the Constitution.
Lately, some larger-than-life leaders are opening and closing their public speeches with a chant of 'Jai Jagannath'. This expression can pass only if the leaders make it a part of chants including Jai Christ, Jai Mahammad, Jai Buddha, Jai Zoroaster and Jai Nanak, etc.
Owaisi was smart. He tamed the saffron fanatics by chanting ‘Jai Bhim' to hail a great warrior depicted admiringly in the Mahabharata. Owaisi talks too much oftentimes, but he is evidently more educated than many of the saffron brigade members. Unfortunately, most elected lawmakers have no idea what the Indian Constitution is all about.
*After the popular elections, Odisha now is in the grip of a Rajya Sabha poll epidemic. Not surprisingly, quite a few aspirants are lobbying for a berth in the Parliament’s Upper House. The recently-discarded Prasanna Patasani, a false baton-wielding charlatan, rightly denied of the Bhubaneswar LS ticket, is galloping from door to door of talkative leaders to organise his relocation to the Rajya Sabha. Some fellows close to him have revealed that he has some deep interests in Delhi. Allegedly, he has put his official residence on hefty rent which will stop flowing if he is not transported to the RS. People may have forgotten about a criminal, who had taken Patasani's official Delhi residence on rent years ago, got nabbed by police and Patasani had to be put under scanner. Somehow or the other, he probably duped the foolish investigators and got away. He is popularly known as a “chicken-devouring” Baba with a PhD certificate from some nondescript organisation. He does not know even today that he cannot use the ‘Dr' prefix in public circles. Habitually, Patasani has kept tilting and bending towards forces that are formidable and difficult to ignore. He had abandoned the Congress when the BJD looked invincible. Shockingly, he, as part of an impotent rebel group, had once blasted Naveen Patnaik terming him a rat snake born of a king cobra,. Later, no one knows how he managed to return to the fold to win elections under the magical Naveen aura. Recently, he has been exposed as a conspirator who sabotaged to ensure the Bhubaneswar BJD MP candidate lost to the opponent. After all this home damage, he still hopes for a Rajya Sabha berth.
There is no clear indication about which three worthy BJD leaders would be chosen for the Rajyha Sabha. It is likely that Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik may pick Arup Patnaik to be one, for Arup, an iconic former topcop, did fight a fierce battle against an enormously prepared BJP lady candidate with a lot of local contact and clout. Arup had nearly won but for the sabotage by a few insiders like the ‘Baba' who feel terribly unsafe with straight talking Arup around. Arup, who lived all his productive life in Maharashtra, got only two weeks for campaigning in his constituency. It would be logical and just to send him to the Upper House, where he will counter the opponents effectively. The other most respectable guy in the chosen list, as the media speculations go, is one Harvard-trained socio-political strategist who has served in seventeen countries as an expert between Hawaii of the US and Davos in Switzerland. When traced by some eminent Odia individual, he was serving as a member of the World Economic Council. An extremely low-profile guy, nearly invisible and unheard of, he is Sujit Kumar who can outsmart Prashant Kishore in poll strategy devising electorate management jobs. Incidentally, this young professional was laterally inducted as a special secretary into the government fold more than three years ago. He is the fittest candidate to adorn the Rajya Sabha as his fundamentals are clear and commonsense is just robust.
There is also some faint murmur about Amar Patnaik, who kicked the IAAS job to join the BJD as a poll survey strategist, analyst and BJD national spokesperson. Not much beyond this is known about him. Believably, he loves academics as reportedly he is now serving as a Dean at the XIMB.
All other names cropping up belong to routinely-established politicians with hardly any impressive credentials. Currently, the Odisha lot at the Rajya Sabha is a bundle of ordinary guys without any intellectual antecedents. They have been politically accommodated.
*The BJP debacle at Kendrapada: Baijayant Panda the former MP from Kendrapada suddenly forgot that he had assumed the proportions of a formidable BJD force because of being under the mystical umbrella of Naveen Patnaik. But he began thinking too big of himself, pointed fingers at the boss on flimsy issues and even stooped low to make digs at some trusted bureaucrats who kept the ‘Naveen mind' functioning freely, as is the case with any heavily-burdened political chief executive. He turned hateful of well-meaning, permanent public officials for performing their constitutional duty and kept blaming the supremo on frivolous nonissues. Eventually, he fell from Naveen’s grace, fought the Kendrapada MP elections on a BJP ticket and got vanquished at the hands of a perfectly non-political movie hulk. The seasoned, stinking rich Baijayant lost to the kid by a margin of 1,52,584 votes. There is now aperception across India that whoever falls from Naveen’s grace once doesn’t find his way back to respectable political stature ever again.
*Lastly to some contentious issue being painfully witnessed in the legal world: In a statement last Tuesday, the Lawyers Collective and its Trustees, including founding members Anand Grover and Indira Jaising, expressed shock and outrage at the CBI move to put the respectable body in trouble. They alleged that an FIR filed against the solidarity body had no basis in fact and in law. “It has been filed to target the organisation and its office bearers to silence them for the cases and issues that they have taken up in the past and continue to take up since 2016. The CBI is nabbing them on make-believe FCRA violations because its office bearers had taken up sensitive cases against the leading figures of the BJP and the Government of India, including Mr. Amit Shah, the present Home Minister, in the Sohrabuddin case, amongst others,” said a top LC functionary.
Politicians in India are probably the most revengeful in the world. They tolerate no one raising voice against them, no matter how grave an issue. !