By D.N. Singh
After a long hiatus between her entry into the Bharatiya Janata Party and now, bureaucrat turned political leader Aparajita Sarangi has once again toes her old line to target chief minister Naveen Patnaik, who in all likelihood is bound to remain a punching bag till the last ballot is cast in 2019.
What is interesting is the style and tenor of Sarangi. She is still far from being political in tone and even in gesture. Abide or suffer, is what the former IAS exuded the other day at a media interaction in Puri while slamming hard at the Naveen-led dispensation for failing to take the slogan of self-reliance of women anywhere. It was a department which had remained with her when she was a serving government officer.
It is different matter that then she failed to notice the glitches in the implementation and now, as a politician, it has come in handy for her to play cynicism card as a rollover tool and further sharpening her attack before the ensuing visit of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Odisha.
What is significantly noticeable is her style of public interaction. She is careful regarding her presence and careful not to be overshadowed by any other tall presence. One rarely finds her in the company of other BJP old-timers and that way she is very selective, perhaps. Even, few of the hoardings on highways showed the face of Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and only Sarangi herself, which manifests that she loves to be in the company of leaders who matter nationally.
Her line of attack is more or less same, women empowerment and so on or a few general jibes aimed at Patnaik and nothing specific topically. Her deliveries, be at a meeting or press meet, sound more like admonitions rather than addresses or submissions. When it is politics, vigilantism is fine but not the vanity in tone and texture, which she is hardly able to shed.
Any leader must learn to address by being complimenting the people but today’s ‘netas’ are sometimes needlessly miser is being humble.
