Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
The 15th National Youth Festival going on in Bhubaneswar was silently yet strongly shown by the State Contingent how in independent India foreigners assisted by Chief Minister Navin Patnaik’s government have put the brave people of Orissa under their clumsy yoke.
Exactly as in British days Orissa’s natural resources were being looted by foreigners and non-Oriyas, during the continuing regime of Navin Patnaik spanning a decade, POSCO and Mittal and Jindal and their breed of foreign and non-Oriya origin have, with the government at their beck and call, set their pernicious grip on every piece of Orissa’s natural heritages, on her mines, on her lands, on her eco-systems, on her national mana.
People of Orissa are bravely fighting to save their soil from foreigners, from non-Oriyas. Their war is continuing against administration at Khandadhar, at Niyamgiri, at Bolangir, at Sambalpur, at Khuntuni, at Kalinga Nagar at Paradeep, at Puri and at every spot where their beloved soil and living environment are threatened with transfer to foreigners and looters of non-Oriya origin. Navin Patnaik administration has emerged as a synonym of loot of mines, as a server of foreign interest.
In British regime, the loot was so rampant that a Collector of Cuttack, W.Trower, though a Briton himself, had the honesty to describe it as “downright rubbery” on his report, dated the 23rd May,1817 (MS. Vol.387, Orissa State Archives). Intelligent youths of Orissa, in the pageant that the 15th National Youth Festival commenced with on 8th, have shown how in ongoing regime of Navin Patnaik Oriyas have been treacherously forced into foreign yoke.
Mark the picture.
A man in bare body, wales all over the chest, but with mustaches erect, represents the entire race of the brave Oriyas as he stands treacherously chained around by the Navin Government, represented by the official dangling down his neck a card of his authority. The official stands at the right side of this picture when in the left side, stands a foreigner with a whip in hand under whose yoke the waled brave man representing the Oriya race haplessly withstands the trauma.
This is what Orissa has now become in independent India. I take my hat off to her youth contingent that participated in the pageant and her thinkers who conceived the idea of projecting how administration has subjected the brave Oriyas to foreign yoke in the same pageant, though in a different guise.