Does your father only count, not Madhu babu, not Gopabandhu, not Baji Raut, Mr. Chief Minister?

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

Dear Chief Minister,
I understand that you have taken the cue from your father Biju Patnaik who transferred his great liability – Kalinga Industries – to IDC in the guise of “gift” to the people of Orissa, when he was the Chief Minister. Justice Khanna, who had presided over the Commission of Enquiry against him, despite being very remarkably lenient, had noted, “The position, as it emerges in the final analysis, is that Mr. Patnaik was able to get rid of and pass on to the IDC the LSF Plant, which in his own words was uneconomical”. In your transferring of your grand father’s old outlived house at Cuttack to the State, to be henceforth repaired and maintained by the Government, under guise of a “gift”, I see the same modus operandi. The house shall not only be a white elephant demanding heavy fodders from the State Exchequer, but also, at State cost, it shall give you your father’s posthumous political utility in power politics.

But, dear Chief Minister, if your ancestral home deserves to be repaired and prepared as a point of tourist interest, attracting people to pay homage to your father, because he had allegedly some undefined dreams for Orissa – such dreams that he had not taught you a single alphabet in Oriya – what about the ancestral homes of the real architects of Orissa, whose dreams coming true, we have our motherland retrieved from filthy grips of our neighboring States?

Does your father only count, not Madhu babu, not Gopabandhu, not Baji Raut, just for example, whose ancestral houses had built them up to make sacrifices for the motherland to the limit that has no comparison?

Would you please come out and say, why State exchequer has never been addressed to preserve their respective birth-campuses so far, despite persistent demands from the public? Why their ancestral homes have not been made State-Monuments? Why the same treatment has not been given to the houses of Laxman Nayak, Veer Surendra Sai and all other martyrs who had laid down their lives in freedom struggle?

Is it not an affront to the wise people of Orissa to squander away the State-exchequer to make a monument in the name of your father whom people of Orissa had rejected for his misrule and who had died as a man whom people had denied another term?

Are you not misusing your father after his death for personal political purpose and thereby not attracting posthumous criticism against your father as people alive in politics generally earn? Is it not real postmortem insult to your father, which you are architecting?

So, please stop posthumous political use of Biju Patnaik. Let him rest in peace.

Stop expenditure from State exchequer for the repair, renovation and extension of your ancestral home. Consult all the political parties and whosoever has research on pre-independence and post-independence personalities marked for their sacrifice for and benevolent service to Orissa. Make a list on whose house should be maintained by the State and made State-monuments. And ensure equal treatment to all of them.

Politics in the name of father is a political nuisance. Becaause of you, Biju Patnaik is now a posthumous politician and therefore, is and would be attracting posthumous criticism. Sad.

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