Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
Modi has come and gone after having a Darshan of Lord Jagannath at Puri on July 16; but he has awoken the election mood in Orissa, which, despite change of gear, Congress, the main Opposition in the State, had not been able to do so far.
My friend Prasanta Patnaik, in his column in a language daily recently, has very ably shown how political parties in Orissa are in discernible crisis in absence of second line of leadership whereas their front line leaders have lost political credibility. To him, BJP suffers also from this syndrome.
I have no reason to disagree with him; yet, there is every reason to say that from now on, Modi would matter, not the BJP in Orissa.
The allegation of communalism against him will have no effect; simply because, the allegers are also communalists. Who of the so-called secular leaders is not communal? Was the mass killing of Sikhs by the organized Congress hoodlums in 1984 non-communal? Does the Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh not display his communal color with the religious turban on his head? Are the caste-politicians, who oppose Modi, not the worst communalists themselves? Do the Communists shun religion? Can adherence to any religion be taken as non-communal? Have the so-called seculars not imposed on us a caste-based census? Is caste-identity not a communal identity? Are castes not rivals in societal space? So, is caste not carrier of community rivalry? And, is community rivalry not communalistic in character? In such circumstances, singling out Modi as communal is not tenable. So, denigration of Modi as a communal leader by the communalists will not click.
With Communists having no political consistency and hence no decisive role to play in elections, even the working class in the State, resigned to their fate and hence to supremacy of God, majority of them being Hindu, Modi’s unreserved Hindu nationalistic approach is quite capable of capturing the working class in Orissa, the land of the believers.
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s exploitive meretriciousness has reached the last brim.
People of Orissa are silently watching how he has been pushing our people into abject poverty and displacement to hand over their beloved soil and natural resources and living environment to foreigners like POSCO and non-Oriya firms like Vedanta and how opposers to his tyranny and treachery are perishing in jails being framed up in false cases.
They are eagerly waiting to take the revenge in the election booths.
They are determined to avenge their insult and loss through the ballots as they had done in case of his father Biju Patnaik, in the 1960s and thereafter till his death, rejecting him at least in two consecutive elections after supporting him once. The Communists could correctly have taken up their leadership. But except the Naxals, none in the left has any credibility left.
If CPM has no hesitation in loud-thinking about having a fresh alliance with the Congress of Manmohan Singh-Sonia and the CPI national secretary feels no qualms in saying that his party would like to have an alliance with BJD, oblivious of how this party is acting against indigenous people to serve the purposes of POSCO and Vedanta and TATA and the likes in Orissa, there should be no surprise, if in public perception, official communists appear as hidden enemies of the people.
An axiom in Oriya says, “a hidden enemy is more dangerous than a known enemy”. This ancient wisdom may guide the people of Orissa to strategically support Modi in 2014. He, in his visit to Orissa yesterday, has ably ignited the electoral feeling that to save the country from the nonchalant Manmohan Singh-Sonia combine that has dragged the toiling people into unbearable economic straights, the pro-American, pro-POSCO politicians must be thwarted out of power.
This feeling will gain momentum as Modi makes more political visits, if he does not remain indecisive in naming Naveen for all the ailments Orissa has been inflicted with.
Till the nation gets the lesson that unless social ownership over all means of production is politically established, there shall be no freedom from the ills India has been subjected to, people’s emerging preference for Modi epitomizing Indian capitalism against agents of American imperialism like Manmohan Singh and his collaborators will not wane away. That the pro-American elements in BJP are not happy with rise of Modi as its campaign leader and de facto Prime Ministerial candidate, is a clear indication of how they also know that he is the man people have started looking at as the ready remedy to subservience of India to American interests.
What would happen after Modi takes over as Prime Minister, if he becomes, is of no relevance at the moment, as the essential need of the moment is saving our national sovereignty from the evil design of the agents of Americas. Election mood in Orissa is getting tuned up to this need.
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