Bhubaneswar, Sept. 27: The Congress leadership today asked its cadres to go to villages and expose “corruption and misdeeds” of the Naveen Patnaik government.
General body of the Congress state unit, which met for the first time after a gap of 15 years, decided to launch a mass contact programme from October 2 to strengthen the party’s base. The general body consists of representatives from block levels to the All India Congress Committee (AICC).
A demoralised party, which has been facing successive electoral defeats after Naveen Patnaik’s entry into politics in 1997, is trying to put its acts together. Violence at its September 5 “Naveen hatao, Odisha banchao” rally and subsequent statewide shutdown have given a fresh leash of life to the party. Today’s meeting was aimed to reactivate the party workers at the grassroots level.
Though the elections are scheduled to be held in 2014, Pradesh Congress Committee president Niranjan Patnaik apparently read out the party’s manifesto for the next round of polls. From promising a CBI inquiry into the alleged misdeeds of the Naveen government to make welfare measures for the uplift of poor and downtrodden, he listed the party’s priorities.
Setting the tone for today’s deliberations, AICC leader in charge of Odisha Jagdish Tytler said the BJD had lost the moral rights to rule the state.
“I had asked 19 questions to Naveen, he had not replied to a single question,” he said, daring the chief minister to a public debate.
In an apparent bid to make the grassroots-level leaders feel more important, he made it clear that party tickets would be distributed on the basis of recommendations made by the block-level units.
Literature highlighting the achievements of the UPA was distributed among the 2,000-odd delegates.
Countering the BJD’s allegation of “step-motherly treatment” of Odisha, the lone central minister from the state, Srikant Jena, said that of Rs 11,000 crore given to the state under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, nearly Rs 2,000 remained unspent.
He promised to give a booklet highlighting release of central funds for various projects in Odisha and also the status of expenditure. The programme implementation minister said Odisha had not been able to spend the money allocated to it.
In a political resolution, the party general body pointed out that the UPA had provided central funds to the tune of Rs 1.09 lakh crore to Odisha during 2004-12, while the NDA had released only Rs 33,844 crore during 1999-2004. “The BJD has been raising the bogey of central neglect only to cover up its failure to utilise central funds and its corrupt deeds,” stated the resolution.
Criticising the BJD’s “double speak” on the coal block allotment, the Congress general body said the Naveen government had not deliberately adopted a specific policy for recommendations to the Centre for allocation of coal blocks to private companies to mobilise election funds. Naveen had recommended coal blocks on the eve of 2009 general elections to two private companies though they had not signed any MoU for value addition.
The Congress also highlighted corruption in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, dal scam, PDS rice bungling and multi-crore mining scam during the BJD regime. It also criticised the BJD’s decision to hike power tariff.
