Samikhsya Bureau
Whatever hides behind the truth but it is a pure case of skulduggery and such issues usually crop up in the election times when most of the politicians try to reinvent the scruples of morale in politics. A complete misfit coinage for the present politics.
The issue is the sudden eruption of the old case of coal block allocation made to an unregistered company under the auspices of Naveen Patnaik, way back in March 1998, when he was the Union steel and mines minister with the added responsibility of handling the coal ministry for a short period. It was then when certain coal mines were leased out to one company named MS Central Colliery, which was reportedly an unregistered one. If it was so, then it was wrong.
But the issue having cropped up at this juncture, well after a hiatus of 21 years by the leaders of the BJP here has raised eyebrows. What has been said that the petition was filed by someone in the court. The allegation by Patnaik’s rivals also raises the question that if the colliery allocations were made on March 25,1998, it goes without saying that the process must have started much before that. And no such decision is not possible without the knowledge of the prime minister’s office.
What cannot be lost sight of is the period when it had happened. If the allocations were made in March 25, 1998, then the files should have made the movements much before that when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the prime minister. Here the issue gets soaked in contradictions as whether the then prime minister had his acquiescence to the allocations or not? Was the government under Vajpayee was condoning the corruption?
It is clear as it is. Patnaik was the minister at the Centre from March 19 1998 to March 5 2000 when it was a NDA rule at the Centre.
Politics can be twisted to look like a marriage of convenience but when it is a question of criminal negligence then the law must be binding for all. But why the then government at the Centre sat over on such a violation and the BJP in Odisha which subsequently enjoyed a prolonged honeymoon with the BJD as alliance partner in Odisha, from 2000 to 2009, why the issue was kept under the carpet for so long? Ironically, even after the break up with the BJD in 2009, the BJP could have raised the issue but it did not.
If Patnaik was a willing partner in the alleged illegal allocation or even had given an unmindful acquiescence to the allocation, the law may follow him but the play up of this two-decade old issue that has filtered itself through many love and hatred between BJD and BJP sounds a bit amazing.
