Around 8.40 pm on Sunday night, a desperate Sitaram Mishra posted an SOS on social media from inside a bus at Manguli Chhack, a major junction on NH 16, Odisha’s capital city. He said police had held up the bus he was travelling in and checking the identity of each passenger to find out if there are any activists of the Navnirman Krushak Sangh (NKS), a farmers’ organization. Not just his bus, every bus at Manguli was being thoroughly checked to spot any NKS men among passengers, he said seeking help.
The police were looking for NKS men to ensure that they don’t converge on Bhubaneswar for a proposed rally on Monday demanding ‘price, prestige and pension’ for farmers. While detaining and whisking away of agitators on the outskirts of the city is not exactly unknown in the Odisha capital, this was the first time the police had gone the extra length to do it. Manguli, after all, is some 50 km from Bhubaneswar. By Monday morning, all entry points to the city had been sealed, causing untold miseries to commuters. Sec 144 was clamped at Tomando to prevent farmers coming from south Odisha from entering Bhubaneswar. When farmers tried to break the cordon, scores of them, including their leaders, were arrested and whisked away by police. On the other side of NH 16, which passes right through the city, hundreds of farmers coming from the Cuttack side were detained. The city, in short, was under siege. If hundreds of them still managed to sneak into the city, it was not due to lack of effort by the police.
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If the police went to unprecedented lengths to foil the rally, there is a reason for it. In December 2013, a handful of NKS activists had managed to dodge Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik’s security cordon and come near his car while he was about to enter the state secretariat. The CM’s security was beefed up with many more policemen drafted for his security and several more vehicles added to his already long cavalcade. Since that lapse in 2013, police have made sure that agitators – and not just NKS members – don’t get within half a km of the Chief Minister!
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As the noon deadline served by NKS for the fulfilment of their demands approached, the state government came out with a hurried response. Finance minister Sashi Bhusan Behera informed the media that a three-member inter-ministerial team, with Agriculture minister Pradip Maharathy and Cooperative minister Surya Narayan Patro as the other members, had been formed to finalise the modalities of talks with the farmers’ body. He invited the leaders of NKS to come for talks.
But Akashay Kumar, national convenor of NKS, rejected the offer of talks outright, saying it made no reference to any of the demands of the farmers. “If farmers cannot enter Bhubaneswar, we will make sure they cannot enter villages,” he thundered. He said there is an ‘undeclared emergency’ in Bhubaneswar but it would not deter the farmers.
With the NKS leader saying members would not budge from Bhubaneswar till the demands are conceded, it would be interesting to see how things pan out over the next few hours.
