Steeled for a storm

But ever since his government signed the MoU with POSCO on June 22, for the 12 million tonne integrated steel project at Paradip, Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) has found itself alone in defending the deal.

As soon as the negotiation started with POSCO, the resentment began. The Congress, however, was caught in a strange situation. While the Congress-led UPA government at the Centre was pushing the deal through, the state unit wasn’t exactly sure what position to take. The result of this self-induced confusion was that its state-wide demonstration ended in chaos.

Former chief minister, J.B. Patnaik, who is now the leader of the opposition in the state assembly, in a signed article in his son-in-law’s vernacular newspaper Sambad, demanded the MoU be scrapped. Orissa will lose Rs 90,000 crore if the iron ore mines are leased to POSCO, he claims.

Two former union steel ministers, Dilip Ray and Braja Kishore Tripathy, have also opposed the deal, apparently more on political grounds than anything else. The two shot off letters to prime minister Manmohan Singh, urging him to scrap the deal. While Ray is a Rajya Sabha member who has been dismissed from the BJD, Tripathy, a BJD Lok Sabha member too has turned dissident.

THE tone for the protest was set when the CPI and the CPM paraded its leading ideologues Prabhat Patnaik, geologists Anand Dev Mukhapadhya, and mineral expert Sanjeev Sarkar, besides CPM secretary general Prakash Karat and CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan, at a seminar called ‘Our mineral wealth and the POSCO agreement’ at Bhubaneswar on July 24. The meet urged people to launch a state-wide agitation against the project.

Ironically, the single largest FDI in the country has divided the ruling coalition. The BJP has opposed the deal, saying its provisions should be radically revised. Party state president Juel Oram wrote to the chief minister listing 12 questions on various aspects of the MoU.

‘‘Oram has some misconceptions about the deal which would be clarified at the right time,’’ said Patnaik. Responding to these developments, Naveen Patnaik convened the BJD-BJP co-ordination meeting on Saturday to iron out the differences between the ruling partners.

The political flutter has now filtered down to ground zero. Villagers fearing displacement have begun organising themselves. Villagers in Dhinkia gram panchyats near the port town of Paradip in Jagatsinghpur district have recently prevented POSCO officials from conducting a survey of the site and collecting soil for testing.

Orissa has had a history of opposing big projects. Earlier it drove out the Tatas who were planning a mega steel project at Gopalpur. Hindalco’s Utkal Alumina International Ltd (UAIL) that proposes to set up a 1 million tonne alumina project with an investment of Rs 4,000 crore has been attempting to locate its project in Kasipur in Rayagada district for the last decade.

‘‘The POSCO project is being opposed out of sheer envy,’’ says BJD spokesperson Damodar Rout. He claims the deal has silenced all detractors in the party and outside who had been complaining that the chief minister had done nothing for the state’s development.

Now the complaint appears to be that he has done too much.