Subhas Chandra Pattanayak
The 2nd session of this Assembly is to commence today under a 3-tier system of policing for security.
For a person like me, who has been reporting the Assembly since 1971, this new arrangement is a conundrum.
More than the unprecedented policing, the question that hunts me is: has our democratic prudence gone into such dilapidation that there is reason for the government to fear that the Assembly cannot be safe, if such policing is not promulgated? Does the Government feel that our people have lost their respect for the Rampart of Democracy?
Democracy is to get stronger day by day in a Republic. But what has happened in our land that the Rampart of Democracy is feeling such unsecured?
Shouldn’t the Assembly members have individual and collective introspection to locate why has the Assembly lost its esteemed stature in the eyes of the people that had made their supreme sacrifices in the freedom movement to build this Assembly?
The Assembly in a 3-tier security system conceived and carried out by the Police is what the people’s august representative of this State should disdain.
Will they take up the issue and set the governance of Orissa on the right track, so that the Police barricades would be removed to make the Assembly the real Rampart of Democracy our freedom fighters had suffered so much to establish?