Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
A person, who, sans any sacrifice for the people and their motherland, gets enthroned as the Prime Minister or a Chief Minister in a democracy in a situation of paucity of befitting claimants, may rule over the gullible people with sycophants blowing trumpets in his/her praise without stoppage; but it is a must that democracy shall stop breathing under that very undeserving person because of machinations he/she must have to employ to thrive on the throne; and because of emergence of plutocracy in the resultant environment.
Both the Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh and the Chief Minister of Orissa Sri Naveen Patnaik belong to this category.
Both of them were placed in power by political midwives in peculiar situations of paucity of claimants and have continued to bag power, term after term, despite blatant misrule in every term.
Both of them have served foreign interest more than they have shown any honest concern for the indigenous toiling masses.
Both of them have given reigns of scams and unleashed State terror to suppress voices of protests.
Both of them have partnered in worsening the miseries of the common people through their pro-rich policies.
When only 150 Indians posses wealth in the range of USD 500 million to USD 999 millions, and only 109 billionaires in the country control 20.5% of the total fortune the ultra wealthy segment comprising 7,730 individuals posses according to World Ultra Wealth Report, 2012-13 by Wealth-X, the UNESCO report on nutrition has exposed that 20% of children under years of five suffer from wasting due to acute undernourishment in India where live one-third of the world’s wasted children. The report has further shown that 43% of Indian children under 5 are underweight and 48% are stunted due to chronic undernourishment. India accounts for more than 3 out of every 10 stunted children of the world, the report has shown.
The Prime Minister had to confess while releasing the HUNGaMA report on hunger and malnutrition on January 10, 2012 that “Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nourishment in the country is unacceptably high. We have also not succeeded in reducing this rate fast enough” (PIB 10.01.12).
The HUNGaMA report released by Dr. Singh has also shown that in Orissa, in all the districts surveyed except only one, have much more than the national average of 48% of the children bellow 5 that are stunting. In districts like Malkangiri, Koraput, and Gajapati percentage of underweight children below 5 are much more than national average of 48%.
So, both Dr. Singh and Sri Patnaik know that their misrule has ruined the people and pushed massive majority of our children below five years of age to severe malnourishment while helping the rich comprising a very small number as shown above grab India’s national wealth.
They know that under the rule of the rich,which each of them has promulgated, the people have lost their purchasing power and unless they are supplied with highly subsidized rice, they would die of starvation.
And, lest massive starvation deaths, inevitable in the climate of starvation they have created, exposes how harmful is the economic policy they have been practicing, a condition of slow starvation was contrived to replace the condition of starvation, by ensuring supply of rice at Rs.2/- per kg.
But the people are so ruined that it was soon realized that they have no financial ability to purchase rice even at Rs.2/- per kg.
Therefore, Naveen has reduced the rate of rice to rupee one per kg in Orissa, which Manmohan is eventually to promulgate in the national level to escape censor for his harmful economic policy and to cultivate votes in 2014 by using the magic of meretricious sympathy for the wretched which the savagely subsidized rice is expected to weave.
You may find in these pages, discussions galore about their misdeeds. Will you, dear readers, wake up to save our fellow beings from the pernicious network of undeserving politicians like these two when our country offers us the opportunity to do so in the coming general elections?