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Sex scandal hits Congress campaign in Orissa

M I Khan in Bhubneswar

The Congress party, already facing a stiff challenge from Naveen Patnaik in Orissa, has suffered a further erosion in its credibility with a sex scandal erupting in the coastal town of Kendrapara and placing Minister for Higher Education Bhagwat Prasad Mohanty under a cloud.

And, although Chief Minister J B Patnaik has come to the aid of his cabinet colleague by upholding his innocence and rejecting the Opposition demand for a CBI inquiry, the damage has been done, and the issue threatens to snowball all across the Kendrapara Lok Sabha constituency and even spill into the neighbouring constituencies.

The issue broke into the limelight in December, with the reported death of a young girl, Annapurna Mohanty. By itself, the suicide of a youth is not enough to send eyebrows shooting, but followed suicides of three more unmarried girls, and the newspapers were having a field day.

The incidents kept the conservative countryside of Kendrapara agog for days on end, and finally the police had to be seen to be doing something. And when it did finally start an investigation into the matter, the uproar over its ineffectiveness forced the state government to order a crime branch probe into the matter.

For the Opposition, this presented a golden opportunity to blacken the ruling Congress party, since the whispering campaign had already targeted minister Mohanty as the culprit in what was obviously a sex scandal. Even as the chief minister defended his colleague, a Public Interest Litigation was filed in the Bhubaneswar high court, seeking an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation. On January 16, the high court directed the crime branch to constitute a special cell to investigate all matters pertaining to sex scandals throughout the state.

"By refusing a CBI inquiry into the sex scandal, the Congress government has made our task easy," says senior Biju Janata Dal leader Debashis Nayak. Other political parties, like the CPI, CPI-M and the BJP women's and youth wings, are also demanding the removal of the minister and a CBI inquiry into the issue.

Caught on the backfoot over the scandal, despite not a shred of evidence surfacing to implicate the state minister, the Congress is planning to join issue with the Opposition by informing the electorate of the ulterior motives behind the campaign.

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