Orissa Matters

Nabin Patnaik Regime Has Turned Out To Be Nightmare For Women Of The State, Reminds OGS In A Fresh Memorandum To Governor

In the matter of Pipili gang-rape-cum-murder, the Orissa Gana Samaj (OGS) repeated its demand for investigation by CBI and speedy penal action on all the rapists and their protectors amongst politicians, police and medical officers without loss of time. On its behalf, the following memorandum was submitted today by its delegates to Governor Murali Chandrakant Bhandare.

Respected Rajyapalji,
We feel terribly hurt and disgusted as despite our consistent campaign, appeal and warning Babina Behera’s life could not be saved. This is undoubtedly a defeat for ethics, laws and institutions thriving for democracy in Orissa. Her death has put a big question mark before the trial of the mass rape case since all circumstantial evidences had been destroyed earlier or not taken care of within the necessary time frame either by deliberate neglect or by possible manipulation and maneuvering, thus making a mockery of the process of prosecution. There has been also criminal negligence by doctors in providing most immediate treatment.

Justice which seemed difficult and looked distorted now seems to be being buried. But still Orissa Gana Samaj thinks all is not gone. If the government of Orissa is serious about punishing the culprits despite their strong links with powerful elements in the ruling BJD it can still do a lot and get justice for the families of the dead sufferers.

As we have all already apprised you in our last appeal in the second week of March 2012, the Orissa Gana Samaj was formed by aggrieved political parties in opposition, agonized intellectuals, activists and political organizations and citizens to get justice for Babina and similar cases across the state concerning helpless women who have been victims of sexual crimes and criminal conspiracies involving politically powerful elements. Because of the campaign of the Orissa Gana Samaj the government did concede to a few demands by dismissing the Inspector -in charge of Pipili police station and by arresting all accused. The agriculture minister was also dropped from the cabinet. But no steps were taken to strengthen the prosecution and to go for a CBI investigation of the Babina rape and attempt to murder case as it involved the rape and death in mysterious circumstances of another girl three years back. If you may kindly recollect, the following concerns and demands were raised in our appeal to you seeking your kind and immediate intervention.

“The Nabin Patnaik regime has turned out to be nightmare for women of the state and this has been abundantly proved in the Pipli gang rape case and all other rape cases reported from across the state.

A dalit girl who could gather the courage to depose before the court in a rape case of her friend Pravati Behera by powerful local elements with ruling party affiliations three years latter herself becomes a victim of gang rape by the same forces. Not only that, the earlier victim also has mysteriously died giving rise to speculation of a well thought out murder and not suicide as officially stated. The incidence that occurred on November 28, 2011 causing the gang rape and attempt to murder of the dalit girl who was witness to the rape of 2008 was also part a criminal conspiracy. In both cases the complicity of the police and ruling pary MLA and Minister of Agriculture in the crime has been subject of strong suspicion. The way the police handled the whole case in the last three years and the way the state run hospitals behaved recently with a dying victim of rape could no more be kept away from public eyes. The Nabin Patnaik government has no answer and no convincing explanation to offer. Simply ordering a judicial inquiry or suspending a police official will not bring justice to the victims- one who has died and the witness of the dead who is battling for life since November 2011. If one of the accused could be arrested now after so many hue and cries was created, why the culprits were not arrested and tried before-asks any conscientious citizen of the state.

Without wasting any further time as presumably you are aware of the developments in the Pipli gang rape case we would like to put forth the following demands with the expectation that as head of state in odisha you will kindly intervene at the earliest and put a check on the erosion of hope for justice in Odisha today.

1. All ruling party elements connected with the crime/accused to be having links with the criminals must immediately be arrested and put behind bar under charges of murder, conspiracy, abetment to rape and murder etc. The Doctors who have neglected treatment of Babina at Pipili, Capital Hospital as well as at S.C.B. Medical College Hospital must be prosecuted for negligence of duty amounting to murder.

2. A CBI investigation of the cases of rape and death of Pravati Behera as well as that of Babina Behera must be taken up immediately.

3. The officers in police hierarchy including DG police and home secretary must be sacked and arrested so that it will discourage the cadre/officers from becoming party to the crime/criminal conspiracies at any level.

4. All rape cases/gang rape cases in the state must be reviewed by an independent body and cases closed before judicial verdicts must be reopened.

5. All rape victims must be enabled to lead a normal life and they must be adequately rehabilitated including the Pipli gang rape victim.

6. Those who have died/got killed/committed suicide next of their kith and kin must be financially compensated.”

7. Cases against Gana Samaj ;leaders is a well planned design to throttle the opinion and fundamental rights and freedom of speech , must be dropped.   Now that Babina has died much to the delight of the culprits and their protectors in the ruling BJD party and government, which apparently they anticipated, the case has taken a new turn. All believers in democracy are eager to know the fate of the case. Had she opened her mouth, truth would have come out. Now since she has been silenced for ever and truth has been made to rest, a CBI investigation can only help in digging out the truth from her grave. It may not be required to reemphasize the fact that Babina’s case is no more a mass rape case. It has become a murder case now. Every murder is done with an intention. The accused may be in judicial custody now but their protectors and their partners in crime are roaming free. They have even gone to the extent of registering a FIR against the members of Odisha Gana Samaj with the single most intention of discouraging us and destroying the case. Therefore, we consider it high time for your good office to intervene and to please initiate action.

Along with other demands submitted earlier we would like to reiterate the following:

1. Ask the Chief Minister to go for a CBI investigation of the rape and murder case of Babina and her friend Pravati. It is because of her courage to get justice for her dead friend Babina paid a price in terms of her dignity and life.

2. Ask the government to book all accused in the rape case under 302 as it has also turned out to be a murder. All police officials and doctors must be immediately booked and tried in this rape and murder case.

3. Babina’s family facing harassment and torture at the instigation of antisocial and ruling party elements in the locality must be rehabilitated honorably elsewhere with protection.

4. All laws protecting women and their dignity must be implemented properly and with provisions of regular and effective monitoring.  With best regards
Yours sincerely
Prasanta Patnaik
And
Rabi Das
Joint Conveners along with the members

MUFP DEMANDS STRINGENT ACTION AGAINST BARGARH DOCTOR FOR ASSAULTING MEDIA PERSONS

At Bargarh, the place of the State’s Health Minister, a state government doctor is running a private clinic at Khajurtikra, ignoring his posting to Kalahandi. He is pediatrician, Dr Prafulla Patra. He and his family members in a combine with criminal intent and murderous ferocity have assaulted on 19 June 2012 four of the local journalists that were trying to verify allegations of exploitation and treachery in health care that a poor patient has raised against Dr. Patra as well as the clinic.

The affected journalists are: Byomakesh Kar (Kamyab TV ), Sri Rajesh Saraf (Naxatra TV) ,Sri Badriprasad Sahu ( STV ) and Sanjib Mahapatra, editor of a Local Oriya weekly Kosal Times.

Members of Bargarh Sambadik Sangha led by its President Shankar Ballav Mishra have already called on the Bargarh District Collector Bhabagrahi Mishra on Friday to demand the arrest of pediatrician.

An FIR has been lodged against the doctor and his family for the criminal offense but the local police are yet to arrest the culprits.

In protest against this official apathy, the Media Unity for Freedom of Press ( MUFP ) held a meeting today under the Freedom Tree in Bhubaneswar, where an affected journalist narrated how he was assaulted and a group of social activists from Bargarh also described how innocent patients are being exploited by doctors like Patra, who despite being government doctors, are running private clinics and operating in connivance with rackets in health care sector.

The MUFP condemned in the strongest terms the criminal assault on the media persons and while expressing its solidarity with the Bargarh Sambadika Sangha, demanded immediate arrest of the doctor and stringent action against him for this criminal act as well as other illegal activities by him and his family members.

The MUFP held that the attack on the Bargarh-based journalists was a direct attack on freedom of press and basic human values and exhorted the district administration as well as the state government to take appropriate action against the accused doctor and his family members without any further delay.

The MUFP also assured all media colleagues in Bargarh that it stands solidly behind them and will do its best to ensure that the guilty is punished and justice delivered to the fellow professionals who were subjected to the criminal assault by the doctor and his family.

Among others, MUFP presidium members Prasanta Patnaik, Sampad Mohapatra, Subhas Chandra Pattanayak, Rabi Das,Ashok Mohapatra, Chief of MBC TV, Sharada Lahangir , Bureau Chief of ANI, Ramesh Chandra Mohanty, Sujata Mohapatra of India TV, Rasmita Das of MBC Tv, etc. attended the protest demonstration.

THE PIPILI SIN: A SCENE FOR ORISSA TO BE ASHAMED OF ITS GOVERNMENT

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

The Pipili gang-rape victim’s cremation gave birth to such a scene that every genuine Oriya should have liked not to have seen.

Orissa has a government that hijacked the Ambulance the victim’s father was using to take her body for funeral at Ghatikia after receiving the same from SCB Medical College, Cuttack; and, arbitrarily halted the cremation for long 51 hours till it totally decomposed.

Perpetrators of the crime being members/supporters of the ruling party, the police was used to suppress the FIR and the medical system was used to make out a case of snake bite in order to protect the criminals. As media exposed the felony, the minister, who represents the Pipili constituency, had tried to intimidate the reporters. This is why the Media Unity for Freedom of Press (MUFP) had to intervene. In its attempt to protect the journalists from the ire of the minister, MUFP involved the general public in expression of solidarity with the media persons of Pipili. This eventually gave birth to Orissa Gana Samaja (OGS), where political parties thought it prudent to unite sans their flags in demanding justice for the victim of the gang rape.

The government, then, had no other way than taking the victim to its own care and providing free advanced treatment at SCB Medical College, Cuttack.

Therefore, since the day her charge was taken over by the government, she was, alive or dead, absolutely official. It was the responsibility of the government to treat her dead body officially. The government should have decided where and how to cremate her and in that, only accommodated her family members in witnessing the cremation and performing the rituals. So, instead of handing over the body to her family, the Medical College should have handed it over to the government. Government did not take over the body from the Medical College. As result of this, the father of the child had taken over the corpse for cremation.

It is shocking that, thereafter, when the corpse, as received from the Hospital, was being carried for cremation in an ambulance, the police planted its men in the same Ambulance, who, at Rasulgarh, threw out the family members accompanying the corpse and instead of allowing the Ambulance proceed for Ghatikia as desired by the father of the victim for her cremation in presence of relations present in that village, forced its driver to proceed towards Puri. As hundreds of onlookers at Rasulgarh watched it, they tried to foil the carjack by the police itself; but they were subjected to brutal beating by a police force summoned to the spot. It was incumbent upon the government to cremate the body of the victim with due dignity; but it failed. This shows how irresponsible, incompetent and confused the government is.

The irresponsibility, incompetency and confusion of the government is squarely established by the very fact that the dead body of the Dalit girl could not be given obituary respect in her own village as her family was not allowed by the caste hindus, the collaborators of the rapists and the mafia ruling the roost there to perform her last rites, even in presence of the police and the magistrates and the men who matter in administration.

Nothing can be more shameful for the people of the State than the fact that, the State could not dare to ensure cremation of the victimized child by her family members in terms of its tradition in their own village, because, failure of administration to keep under leash the hounds that tortured her to death, was too alarming for them to perform the last rites in their place of birth.

That, the government failed to have the cremation in the birthplace of Babina, the victim, has established that law is not working in Pipili and administration has no control over the area.

It has become a free land for fellows in or close to power to rape any girl of the locality, to attempt to murder her post-rape, to use police and medical officers to arrange death of the victim in medical environment so that the curpus delicti would be of no active witness utility, to keep the family of the victim under constant alarming intimidation so as to deter it from taking appropriate legal action, to purchase the silence of the victim’s relations through posthumous release of massive amount of money from the state exchequer in the style of the ruling chief minister’s help, to use a section of obliging media and village touts and vested-interest politicians to demoralize the civil-society activists through cultivated insinuations even while managing the prosecution to weaken the case by eliminating/ignoring material evidences.

Every Oriya should feel ashamed of having such a chief minister, such a government, such a network of crime and such a situation.

Geriatric Hospitals Are Essential

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

Six months!

Six months without her because of whom, after passing away of my father in 1988, I was not an orphan.

My mother passed away at Bhubaneswar six months ago on December 16, 2011.

After igniting her pyre in “Swargadwar” crematorium, Puri, while waiting for the Malabhai (group of my brotherhood who performed the cremation) to come with her ashes, on the beach of Mahodadhi, my sobs had taken the following form:

(These two pages are from Dahana Daha, published on her Dwadashah)

And, while jotting down the above stanzas, I was consoling myself that the fire would immortalize my mother with the elements and make her omnipresent for me to feel her presence every moment, everywhere.

All these six months, in every moment of solitude, I have felt her presence in her omnipresent form, have taken my sleep as if in her lap, have welcomed the wee hours everyday to see how the sleeping world wakes up to her eternal call to work apace.

Working apace was my mother’s celebrated habit all her life. She was always busy in works after waking up in the wee hours till retiring around midnight. Her loving care was not limited only to the family members but also was fabulously available to the plants on our soil, to the pets in our house as well as to our relations and family friends, including the friends of the friends and to casual visitors. Everybody in our extended family, in our immediate neighborhood and of my clan in the village, was of unreserved reverence and utmost affection for her. When the news of her illness had reached them, they were as anxious for her recovery as they were in tears on getting the sad news of her demise. She was really unique. Not a moment of her life was spent in idleness. When no specific work was to be done, she was reading books and browsing through newspapers and keeping herself abreast of developments in socio-political and economic fields.

I was in USA for six months. On return, to meet her, I went to my native place Tigiria, where I had left her with my brothers before going abroad. She told me that she was having some pain in the abdomen sometimes. I brought her back to Bhubaneswar, my professional place of living. And, consulted the Capital Hospital. It is the State headquarters hospital of Orissa Government conceived originally to be what AIIMS is to government of India. But self-centric persons taking over political reign of the State since 1960, the idea was abandoned. Yet, senior specialists in different disciplines are being posted here and Professors of super-specialty departments of SCB Medical College are conducting outdoor treatment everyday in weekly rotations under orders of the Government. Under their advice I admitted my mother in the nursing home of this hospital. After a week, under their advice again, I took her to Kalinga Hospital for an endoscopic investigation. I shudder to write what happened thereafter. I am sure, had I not taken my mother to Kalinga Hospital, she would certainly have been alive as yet. Recalling that experience is so painful and frustrating that I am yet unable to find words to make a report on that. Someday, when time shall, to manageable extent, heal up the wounds of my soul, I will narrate my mother’s Kalinga Hospital phase and how brutally that shortened her life.

However, as the first six months of her passing away have passed away, I feel it necessary to say that I could have given her proper treatment if any hospital in Orissa (in hope against hope, I had to contact and consult all who mattered in respect to her health in all the government and private hospitals in my State under reference and cross-references), could have any scope for geriatric treatment.

There is no geriatric care specialties in any of its medical colleges and in the private hospitals that are making money under brand names.

The general impression is being given to the elderly / aged patient is that his/her suffering is caused by old age, sans any concern for what impact such statements from the treating physician should be putting on the psyche of the affected.

I feel, we all will fail in our duties to our elders if we fail to force the governments to put priority on establishment of geriatric hospitals with super-specialty departments addressed to diseases that are expected to afflict the parents and the grandparents in course of time.

With massive majority in Orissa perishing below the poverty line, because of mismanagement of the mineral-rich State by commission agents in power, the geriatric problems are more menacing in rural areas, where, the available medical practitioners have no training at all in geriatric care.

No Doctor in Orissa has any training in geriatric medicines. No Nurse has any training in geriatric care.

Old persons are admitted in general wards and treated generally, with open suggestions that their diseases are “old-age-diseases”, which precipitates their debacle, as they feel they cannot be cured. This has to be stopped.

My family being a big joint family, my mother was in no dearth of caring hands. Yet, I feel, had we in the family have enough awareness in geriatric problems, and orientation in physical and psychological care of the elderly, my mother could have received more defined and desirable nursing than that she got in the hospitals. So, it is necessary that the general public be made aware of geriatric necessities.

The Panchayats and urban civic bodies need be instructed and enforced to orientalize the people within their jurisdictions on locating geriatric problems, on dealing with the elderly, on how to keep them in better health.

The MLAs and MPs Local Area Development Funds are being mostly misused and cycled into their private pockets, a small part of the booty distributed amongst their followers and false bill preparers. The funds necessary for geriatric programs can be obtained officially from the LAD funds given to MLAs and MPs.

But unless geriatric hospitals are specifically established, and super-specialty departments to deal with geriatric problems are created in Medical Colleges and Doctors as well as Nurses are given orientation training in geriatric treatment and care, the general awareness cannot be sharpened on this issue.

So, instead of squandering away Orissa’s natural resources for benefit of private capitalists, even foreign industries, shouldn’t the State Government take steps to ensure better health care for elder generations, by establishing geriatric hospitals, at least one in every district?

IS THERE ANY GODMAN WHO IS NOT A DEVIL?

Subhas Chandra Pattanayak

Swami Nityananda, a self-styled Godman, a swindler and a sex-offender in the eyes of prosecution, enlarged on bail last year in trial for crimes including rape, is hiding when the Karnataka Police is chasing after him on recent orders of the Chief Minister to take him into custody on fresh allegation of crime and after his pet goons assaulted the reporters querying about his alleged refusal to accept court summons on charges of sexual abuse raised newly by one of his victims, a woman belonging to USA.

The criminals are using bails as their freedom to commit further crimes as the courts are not binding them to prove themselves innocent within a stipulated period. By wrongful interpretation of bail, the courts are helping criminals to hoodwink the law and to stay free to play further havoc upon the society.

It is absolutely wrong to assume that everybody is innocent until proved guilty. Judiciary from bottom to top is addicted to this wrong. Therefore, the criminals are misusing bails to their own advantage.

It is not that the bail granting judge considers the accused not guilty.

The cognizance of the case against the accused is by itself indicative of acceptance of the alleged offense as true until proved otherwise.

So, the accused, granted bail, is an offender until proved innocent.

In other words, the judge holds the accused prima facie guilty; but honoring human rights, grants him time to prove himself not guilty.

This is the concept of bail.

Therefore, every bail needs be time-bound with stipulation that the accused must prove his/her innocence within the period of bail, failing which the court should simply pronounce the punishment, provided for the offense under the penal codes.

But judiciary is not doing it. As a result of which, judges are continuing to make farce of their power to grant bails; crimes are spreading and criminals are not being properly punished and the society is not being free from the grips of the offenders, the shrewd Sri Sris, the avaricious Babas, the spiritual looking mafias, the Gurus and the Godmen.

Had the so-called Godman Nityananda not been enlarged on bail or had his bail been time-bound and had he been required to prove his innocence within the boundary of that time, he might have already been punished for the crimes he is charged with or the cause of seeing in him a menace might have been removed.

But going through the Nityananda episode one does not feel like seeing something exceptional in the self-styled Godman.

In the country of the Sathya Sais, of Jayendra Saraswatis, of Chandraswamies, of Krupalus, of Thakurs, of Dadas, of Didis, of Dhirendra Brahmacharies, of Nirmal Babas and the likes, who of the so-called Godmen is not a devil?