Top Odisha bureaucrats and police officers have drawn fire from the Opposition parties after they made a beeline at Chief Minister and BJD supremo Naveen Patnaik’s residence in Bhubaneswar to congratulate him on his party’s electoral victories.
A slew of senior IAS and IPS officers and members of various Service Associations met CM Patnaik in batches last Sunday to congratulate him over the BJD’s triumph in recent rural and urban local body elections.
While the delegation of IAS officers, who called on the CM, was led by Chief Secretary Suresh Chandra Mohapatra, the group of IPS officers was led by director general of police (DGP) Sunil Kumar Bansal.
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Slamming the officers and the BJD chief, the Opposition called their meeting a “shameful chapter in Odisha’s bureaucratic history” and “a violation of IAS and IPS service code of conduct”.
The principal Opposition BJP’s general secretary Prithviraj Harichandan accused the IAS and IPS officers of allegedly “bringing disgrace” to their services and lowering the dignity of the executive branch. “The officers’ conduct ridicules democracy. We strongly condemn this behaviour,” he charged.
The Congress echoed the BJP’s allegations. “It seems the real cadre of the BJD is the state bureaucracy which has ceased to exist independently,” senior state Congress leader Satya Nayak charged.
Hitting back at the Opposition, BJD spokesperson Lenin Mohanty said, “These are extremely cheap tactics after failing to gain the confidence of the people of Odisha in the recently concluded Zilla Parishad and urban local body elections. The Odisha BJP is perhaps unaware that after recent elections in BJP-ruled states as well, senior bureaucrats went and met the chief ministers there and congratulated them on their party’s victory. There is nothing wrong with that. It happens across India and it is a tradition.”
Defending the officers, Mohanty said their “gesture showed respect towards the people’s mandate”.
At the centre of the row are Chief Secretary Mohapatra and DGP Bansal.
Mohapatra, a 1986 batch IAS officer, is the second senior-most IAS officer of Odisha cadre after Upendra Prasad Singh. He was appointed as the Chief Secretary in December last year. Born in 1962 in Deogarh, he completed his BSc from Ravenshaw College and Master’s in Applied Geology from ISM, Dhanbad. He joined the IAS after a brief stint in a public sector oil corporation.
During the tenure of former CM Biju Patnaik. Naveen’s father, in the nineties, Mohapatra was also considered to be close to him. He was the first collector of the then newly-formed Bhadrak district, which had witnessed communal riots in 1991. As the Kandhamal district collector, he was entrusted with handling riots there in 2007 and 2008. In the bureaucratic circles, he is known for his “no-nonsense approach and getting things done”.
“Mohapatra has always been dependable. One could trust him with getting results irrespective of the task. I think that took him ahead,” a former bureaucrat said.
Mohapatra has always been the Odisha dispensation’s first choice to manage affairs relating to the Puri Jagannath temple. He was appointed as the Puri collector during the 1996 Nabakalebar of Lord Jagannath, when he led a drive to remove encroachments from around the Puri temple to ensure its smooth conduct.
Nabakalebar is a unique feature of the Puri temple, when there is a total replacement of its wooden idols. It symbolises that they are living deities who undergo new embodiment periodically. The tradition occurs at an interval of 8,11,12 and 19 years. Again in 2015, Mohapatra was appointed as the chief administrator of the Puri temple when Nabakalebar was conducted. Currently, he is the chairman of the Puri temple management committee.
Bansal, who took charge as the Odisha DGP on January 1 this year, had been on central deputation for most of his career. The 1987 batch IPS officer was serving as the Intelligence Bureau (IB) special director in Delhi before returning to Odisha. His first posting in Odisha was as an assistant superintendent of police at Dhenkanal in 1988. He then went on to serve as the sub-divisional police officer in Talcher and then as an ASP in Sambalpur. In 1992 he also served as the commandant of the 4th battalion of the Odisha Special Armed Police (OSAP). He had served as the Mayurbhanj SP from May 1992 to January 1994 and as the SP, Vigilance Department, in Sambalpur from January 1994 to September 1994. He subsequently left the state on central deputation.
Source: india Express
