The NEWS Syndicate
Despite two decades in power, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has not yet learned how Laws are made and amended. He complies with the notings of bureaucracy and as member-in-charge, serves a notice on the Assembly to bring in the legislation and then delegates the responsibility of moving the Bill in the Assembly and answering the debate to a member of his Cabinet.
This being his habit, the bureaucracy has played havoc with the Orissa Official Language Act by repeated wrongful amendments designed to destroy the right of the people of Orissa to manage their official affairs in Oriya, which the Act had provided for; and for the sole purpose of which, the Province of Orissa was created in 1936 at the summit of a splendid movement of the people that had begun in 1870.
The Act was first sabotaged by Biju Patnaik in 1963 for the purpose of retaining English as Official Language under the pretense of legislative purpose. His son Naveen, in dancing to the tune of a scheming bureaucracy dominated by non-Oriya IAS officers, has pushed the Act into atrophy by blatantly wrong and illegal amendments.
ORISSA MATTERS Chief Subhas Chandra Pattanayak, founder of ‘Silent Black Flag Campaign’ christened ‘Bhasha Andolan’, who, as member of ‘Ministerial Committee on Working of the Act’ had given a set of draft legislation, which could have ensured true implementation of the Act, showed in a seminar on the Act at Bhubaneswar on 22 December, how his advice has been misused by the Chief Minister to destroy the very purpose of the Act. Here is what he said.
A noble campaigner for governance of Orissa in Oriya language, CA Ranjan Kumar Sahoo stressed that, to stand with the celebrated Black Flag of the ongoing language movement is the same as standing with the mother in her ailing time. Here is what he said.
Young activist Nirmal Kumar declared that, he would hoist the Black Flag atop his residence in order to make the campaign household. Here is what he said.
Absence of official use makes a language dead, said Soubhagya Rout, citing the instance of Sanskrit. Here is what he said.
Others who addressed the seminar were Bijay Tripathy,Mahesh Das, Naveen Mishra and Antaryami Barik.