Bravo, Mr Naveen Patnaik! Keep It Up!

It was sheer delight to watch your performance in the TV interview with Mr Karan Thapar. Your clipped upper-class monosyllabic replies warmed up the heart of an old Anglophile. After all, the British did not rule this country in vain. Today we really have an Englistan, as the Mahatma prophesised one hundred years ago in a small booklet called Hind Swaraj (which, in his own words, was the production of a fool), rather than Hindustan, in India.

Your understated replies, like the old-world British aristocrat, conveyed more eloquently your views than any harangue by a soapbox orator. God often gives some of his chosen creatures some extra-sensory perception to ferret out mates from unknown corners either for the procreation of the species or for chumming up for the furtherance of a common interest. With great coolness and poise you declared that you would be equally comfortable with the Maratha chieftain as the PM, as with either of the Commissars from Kolkata or Delhi. One wonders with what precision and incisiveness you could discern the common trait of fascism in the NCP, BJD and the counterfeit Marxists.

As a reluctant debutante you performed extraordinarily as the elected fascist ruler of Orissa. You charmed the citizens of Orissa by your utter uncommunicative gestures and body language. You have not yet been able to master your biological father tongue, Oriya. Yet you mesmerised the populace by your sheer silence and oppressive actions. While nobody can accuse your illustrious father as unpatriotic, you have by the stroke of a pen defacto ceded 4000 acres of Orissa’s (India’s) best farmlands and forests to the multinational company called POSCO declaring the area as SEZ. The Indian fiscal laws would not apply there. Nor would other laws, under whose yoke ordinary Indians groan and suffer, would be enforced. POSCO would enjoy lawless freedom under a lawless Indian law called the Special Economic Zone Act, 2005.

One has to applaud your extraordinary discernment to find fascistic attributes among the fraudulent Marxists who bloodied their claws and canine teeth with human blood in Singur and Nandigram. The NCP is, however, more transparent. They make no bones about their inherent fascist character. What you three have in common in ample measure is your determination to promote crony capitalism through the misuse of state power. That is called fascism.

It is just a point of information. Is it known to you, Mr Patnaik, that POSCO’s Pohan facility, which produces near-about 16 million tonnes of steel per annum, has an area less than a thousand acres? Then why should they require an area of 4000 acres of Indian territory for a facility for producing 10-12 million tonnes of steel? Do you have any explanation except your inner desire to promote international capitalism through state backing? Why should they require a new port facility when their factory would be in the close hinterland of the modern Paradeep port which your father built fighting with the Centre? You have a state-owned Orissa Mining Corporation. Why wasn’t it given the exclusive mining right of iron ore to be supplied to POSCO’s proposed steel factory? The profit they could have earned could have been ploughed back for restoring the ecological balance which would be severely damaged through slaughter mining of the iron ore. Why have you kept Mr Abhay Sahu in jail? He is a sick person, who is a member of the Orissa State Committee of the Communist Party of India and who had been leading a Gandhian passive resistance movement against forcible acquisition of homestead, farmland as well as rich beetle vines in the Dhinkia panchayat area of Jagatsinghpur district’s Ersama block. He was arrested in August 2008. We are in the month of April 2009. For eight long months he is suffering imprisonment without trial. Don’t all these fit in with the perfect fascist behaviour?

In spite of all these delinquencies, infirmities and faults, I shall be failing in my duty as a casual observer of the Indian political scene if I did not compliment you heartily for openly bringing to the fore the ugly fascistic traits of the CPI-M and the NCP by tearing apart their false Marxist and pseudo-Gandhian masks. You have rendered a signal service to the Indian masses at the time of the 15th Lok Sabha elections.

Bravo, Mr Naveen Patnaik! Keep it up!

The author is a former Secretary, Revenue, Government of India and the architect of ‘Operation Barga’ that changed the face of the West Bengal countryside.