J.B. Patnaik, Maheswar Mohanty

Bhubaneswar, Dec. 21: Revenue and disaster management minister and BJP leader Manmohan Samal, who resigned from his post recently over his “sexual escapades”, is not the first politician from Orissa to find himself in the line of fire. The state seems to have spawned others, too.

Samal allegedly indulged in sexual relations with a married woman, hailing from his Dhamnagar constituency in Bhadrak, during his visit to New Delhi. Though the lady in question denied the allegation, Samal had to resign on “moral grounds”.

A prior victim of the sleaze politics was former Speaker Maheswar Mohanty. He lost his post in March 2008 after Gayatri Panda, a Lady Marshal, accused him of harassment. Mohanty, too, was forced to step down on moral grounds after the 29-year-old alleged in an FIR, lodged in the Bhubaneswar Mahila police station, that the former began to harass her after she refused to grant him “favours”. In early Nineties, Damodar Rout, a senior minister in the Janata Dal government headed by Biju Patnaik, was accused of sexual misdemeanour and this time the victim was one Basanti Bera, a panchayat samiti chairperson from Kutra block in Sundargarh. Though Biju defended his colleague and a fact-finding team, headed by former chief minister Nandini Satpathy, gave a clean chit, Rout had to face angry demonstrations.

In late Eighties, veteran Congress leader and the then chief minister J.B. Patnaik was part of a scandal after a report came out in the Illustrated Weekly of India. In 1999, the same man was again in the line of fire when Anjana Mishra, estranged wife of an Indian forest service officer, alleged that she was gang raped by three men at the behest of Patnaik. Anjana also accused Patnaik of shielding the then advocate general and close confidant Indrajit Ray, who had allegedly attempted to molest her.

Patnaik was once more embroiled in a scandal when Jaydev Panda, a Congressman and associate, swore in an affidavit before a public notary that the former had sexually exploited his wife, Babita. But the controversy died down after Panda’s death in an accident.

Thus, in the state, it seems that history has repeated itself often. “Our politicians have never learnt lessons from the past,” said a senior columnist, Barendra Dhal.