Bhubaneswar, June 2: Odisha has taken a leaf out of Bihar’s book. It is now this state’s turn to organise a show of strength in Delhi to demand special category status.
Thousands of BJD workers will throng the Ramlila Maidan in the national capital on June 12 for the party’s Swabhiman Divas rally.
“We have decided to take the battle to Delhi,” said panchayati raj minister Kalpataru Das soon after the date and venue of the rally were decided here today. The party is pulling out all stops to make its first-ever show of strength outside Odisha a success.
Chief minister Naveen Patnaik, who is supposed to address the June 12 rally, is leaving for Delhi tomorrow to oversee the preparations. The party has constituted six co-ordination committees to ensure foolproof arrangements for the Delhi event. Sources said the committees are headed by five ministers — Kalpataru Das, Debi Mishra, Surya Narayan Patro, Arun Sahu, Pratap Kesari Deb, and the government deputy chief whip, Sanjay Das Burma.
BJD leaders are co-ordinating with various organisations of Odias in Delhi and bordering areas such as Ghaziabad and Faridabad to ensure a crowd of 30,000 to 40,000 people. Following the rally, a 30-member delegation will present a memorandum carrying one crore signatures gathered from different parts of the state during the past few weeks to President Pranab Mukherjee.
Party sources said the President had given his consent to meet the delegation.
Six special trains carrying BJD workers will leave for Delhi on June 10 from Puri, Cuttack, Jajpur, Koraput, Sambalpur and Berhampur. While two to three compartments in all Delhi-bound trains have been booked for party workers, the railways have been requested to spare four more trains exclusively for the BJD’s rally.
Old timers said the June 12 rally at Ramlila Maidan would be unprecedented given the scale at which it was being organised. “Only once before, in the 1970s, Utkal Congress, a regional outfit floated by Biju Patnaik, had held a rally in Delhi to highlight Odisha’s neglect by the Centre in the area of railways development. But that was on a much smaller scale,” said former finance minister Panchanan Kanungo.
The Opposition, however, is far from convinced. “The chief minister is enacting a drama over the special category issue. When the NDA was in power and the then home minister L.K. Advani had rejected the demand of the state for this status, the BJD did nothing. We would have appreciated had they ended their alliance with the BJP then,” said state Congress president Jaydev Jena.
Pointing out that the demand was neither raised by Naveen, when he was a minister at the Centre, nor by his father Biju Patnaik, when he was heading a Janata Dal government in the state, Jena said the BJD has chosen a wrong time to raise the issue in Delhi.
“Now that Union finance minister has constituted a committee to have a fresh look at it, they should have waited,” said Jena.
