Bhubaneswar: Willing to hit, but reluctant to hurt. That just about sums up BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi's speech at the Vijay Sankalp Samavesh in Bhubaneswar this afternoon. During his hour-long speech, Modi put his finger on all that is wrong with Odisha, but stopped short of castigating Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik for any of the ills.
Though he took a couple of good natured digs at the BJD boss, his speech lacked the sting that was unmistakable in that of state unit president Kanak Vardhan Singhdeo earlier. There was absolutely no mention of the great mining scam, currently Patnaik's soft spot, or any other scam that the BJD government is embroiled in. Nor was there any mention of the Odisha chief minister's failure to curb the Maoist menace in the state. All that Modi found the Odisha strongman worth chiding for was his failure to prevent the migration of the people of the state, including those from his own district, to Gujarat in search of job.
Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. PTI
"There is not a single district or even a block in your state from where people have not come to Gujarat to work. But I find that the overwhelming majority of them are from Ganjam. When I ask them where Ganjam is, they say it is the district of the chief minister," Modi said amid a peal of laughter in the crowd.
After beginning his speech with a sprinkling of Odia, the Gujarat chief minister hastened to add that he did not do so to demean the Odisha chief minister, who still cannot speak the language of the state even 14 years after becoming chief minister. Significantly, Modi did not name Naveen even once during his fairly long speech.
Even more significantly, Modi invoked the legendary Biju Patnaik, Naveen Patnik's late father and the man after whom the BJD is named, to wonder aloud how the great man must be turning in his grave at the sorry plight of the state that he loved so much.
In the run up to the rally, the one thing that political circles in the state were waiting eagerly to see was how Modi would deal with Naveen; whether he would toe the line taken by almost all central leaders of the party of treating the Odisha chief minister with kid gloves or deviate from the script and attack the BJD president for his alleged failures.
The rally today has provided the answer: the BJP, under his leadership, would not do anything to take its relationship with the BJD to a point of no return. With both Lok Sabha and Assembly elections due in the state in the next couple of months, Modi's speech today was the clearest possible indication that he wants to keep the option of some kind of a post-poll arrangement with the ruling party in the state open – at least till the elections are over.
Unlike BJP president Rajnath Singh who spoke before him, Modi did not dwell too much on the Congress and decided to tear the Third Front apart instead. "The 11 parties, which constitute the Front, wear the garb of the Third Front whenever election time comes and then go on to support the Congress after the polls," he said, pointing to the fact nine out of the 11 parties that met in New Delhi have been in alliance with the Congress in the recent past. No one missed the point that he left unsaid; BJD is one of the only two parties in the proposed Third Front, which has never sided with the Congress.
The other significant feature of Modi's speech today was the wholesome praise that he showered on Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Raman Singh for the splendid work they have done in their respective states. "Ten years ago, there was not much to choose between Odisha and Chhattisgarh, its neighbour. Both shared more or less the same problems; Maoism, poverty and unemployment. But today, Chhattisgarh has marched ahead under the able leadership of Raman Singh while Odisha continues to remain where it was: at the top of the list of poor states," he said.
In his first major rally in the state, the Gujarat strongman sought to strike all the right notes; tugging at the emotional chord of the assembled crowd by invoking Lord Jagannath and professing his love for the Odia language which he said was the virtual second language in Surat. But he certainly disappointed a lot of them who had come to the meeting expecting to hear the saffron warrior tear into the presiding deity of the political firmament in the state.
No comments:
Post a Comment