BHUBANESWAR: A day after Odisha’s Gopalpur MLA Pradeep Panigrahy faced an egg attack from a splinter group of his own party Biju Janata Dal (BJD) while proceeding to a meeting of chief minister Naveen Patnaik’s private secretary VK Pandian, the Congress on Saturday alleged that a kind of jungle raj prevailed in the state.
Senior Congress leader and Kantabanji MLA Santosh Singh Saluja said preventing a people’s representative from attending a meeting and engineering an assault on him reflected how hooligans were ruling the roost in the state. The lawmaker threatened that if the CM does not stop delegating bureaucrat VK Pandian to different pockets of the state to strengthen the support, the latter would be greeted with eggs and ink at every public meeting he attends.
“During VK Pandian’s visit to Ganjam district, there was an egg attack on MLA Pradeep Panigrahy. But nobody was arrested. While the protesting members belonging to the opposition parties are being booked under attempt to murder charge for throwing eggs at ruling party politicians, here no such action was seen as the persons who attacked Pradeep Panigrahy are from the ruling party. The CM’s pet paraphrase ‘law will take its own course’ has fallen flat here. Law is twisted here to favour the hooligans as they are supporters of VK Pandian,” alleged Saluja while addressing a press conference in Bhubaneswar.
Invoking the recent ink attack on VK Pandian in Puri, Saluja further said, “It seems Pandian has staged the ink attack on him to gain sympathy from voters. If not, then I call upon everybody to resort to ink and egg attack wherever he goes to attend public meetings,” Saluja added.
Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) president Sarat Pattanayak said, “While Section 307 is slapped for egg attack on Naveen Patnaik, others go scot-free for a similar attack on Pradeep Panigrahy. There is a jungle raj currently going on in Odisha. There is no State in India where such kind of administration is going on.”
“I demand the arrest of all the culprits who attacked Pradeep Panigrahy on Friday just like the arrest of Congress members who were charged for similar egg-hurling attempts. If the administration and police remain silent, then we will have to take to the streets again,” Pattanayak said.
