Odisha diary: A prodigal politician and a tiger gone astray

by Sandeep Sahu Can Pyari do a Yeddy? These days the frequently asked question in Odisha’s political circles is this: can Pyari Mohan Mohapatra, once Naveen Patnaik’s Man Friday, do a Yeddyuruppa in the state? Some of the similarities between the two are obvious. Like his Karnataka counterpart, Pyari was for long synonymous with the party organisation in the state. Just like Yeddy, Pyari broke away from the parent party to form his own outfit. He floated his own party Odisha Jan Morcha (OJM). Like the former Karnataka strongman again, this bureaucrat-turned-politician in Odisha has also made it clear that his primary agenda is to dethrone the party he once lorded over. But the parallels end just about there. Unlike Yeddyuruppa, Pyari never had a connect with the masses. The man dubbed ‘Chanakya’ has always been the quintessential backroom boy, managing the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) organisation and the power equations within the party. He usually stayed away from the media spotlight. After he was thrown out of BJD by party supremo Naveen Patnaik, Pyari claimed that about 70 of the party’s 103 MLA’s were loyal to him. However, not a single MLA or MP has come out in Pyari’s support. [caption id=“attachment_792357” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]  A tiger strayed into the Nandankanan zoo. Representative image. AFP.[/caption] In sharp contrast, Yeddyurappa took away a sizable number of MLAs - and even some ministers - with him when he parted ways with the BJP. While observers of the political scene do concede that Pyari’s outfit has the potential to damage the chances of the ruling party candidates in selected constituencies, nobody thinks he has the kind of clout that Yedyurappa has in Karnataka. Wrong man, wrong job The recent appointment of Bhakta Charan Das as one of the spokespersons for the Congress has amused Congressmen and the public at large in Odisha and has spawned a host of jokes. While the Kalahandi MP’s standing in the party’s hierarchy can hardly be questioned, his credentials to be a national spokesperson for the biggest and the oldest party in the country are certainly suspect. With his far-from-perfect English and pedestrian Hindi, he is hardly the articulate person that a party spokesperson needs to be. In fact he is not very expressive even in his mother tongue, Odia. Following his first press conference as the party spokesperson reporters in Bhubaneswar were heard making some really unpalatable, below-the-belt comments about Das. “This man does not even deserve to be the spokesperson for the Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (OPCC), forget being one for the AICC,” commented one of them. “May be it is the Congress’ way of giving representation to all sections in society,” said another, clearly alluding to the fact that Das belongs to the Scheduled Caste (SC) category. With the Congress having a lot to answer in the run-up to the next parliamentary elections, even Congressmen in private concede that the party high command may have reasons to regret its decision to appoint the affable but highly inarticulate Kalahandi as a spokesperson. Chit fund scandal and its unlikely victims The ongoing crackdown on chit fund companies in Odisha in the wake of the Saradha scam in neighbouring West Bengal has had an unlikely victim - the media. With vernacular dailies and television news channels launched by these companies wrapping up operations one after another, several media people have been rendered unemployed. ‘Sarbasadharana’ (and ‘Common Times’, its sister publication in English), the media ventures of the SVL group, ‘Odisha Kiran’ promoted by the Artha Tatwa (AT) group and ‘Nutan Odisha’ launched by the Adarsh group have already closed shop while STV, the news channel started by the Seashore group, is all set to follow suit. Journalists working for some newspapers and TV channels promoted by some micro finance and cooperative credit societies are also waiting for the inevitable to happen. There are almost 100 media people who are out of job and the number is on the rise. Then there are the stillborn media forays of some companies. ‘Saradha’, now under the scanner of multiple regulatory bodies, was all set to launch an Odisha edition of its Kolkata-based English daily ‘Bengal Post’ before it went bust. The company headed by Sudipta Sen, with substantial stakes in Odisha, had reportedly hired the services of a Bhubaneswar-based reporter of a leading financial daily to recruit editorial staff for the Odisha edition. Likewise, Rose Valley, another company currently under the spotlight, has shelved its plans to either launch or take over a news channel in the state. While those who planned to join these ventures must be thanking their stars, the unlucky hordes who bit the bait and have now become jobless. Look who’s here! The guest in stripes An uninvited visitor checked into the Nandankanan zoo on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar a fortnight ago. Since then the zoo authorities, wildlife experts and local villagers are having sleepless nights. The ‘guest’ is actually a wild male tiger in the prime of its youth (six to seven years), which strayed into the zoo on April 30 last looking for a mate and has simply refused to budge. It has been roaming freely in the 12-hectare tiger safari inside the zoo since then. While former zoo director and an acclaimed tiger expert Saroj Patnaik made a strong case for keeping the animal in the zoo in view of the obvious threat that drove it away from its natural habitat, wildlife activist and member of the National Board for Wildlife Biswajit Mohanty shot off a letter to the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) strongly opposing the move to keep the wild tiger in captivity. Following the furore over the issue, the state government appointed a technical committee headed by the chief wildlife warden, zoo officials, a member of the NTCA and the sarpacnh of the area, to take a decision on the matter. On Wednesday, the committee decided that the wild cat would stay in the zoo temporarily - till its deportation to a natural habitat. The committee also decided that the movements of the tiger would be restricted to a smaller area of the large safari and it would be kept away from the gaze of the visitors. Villagers in the area in the meantime have added a new dimension to the whole issue by demanding that the tiger be kept in the zoo lest is poses a threat to the people in the nearby areas.