BHUBANESWAR: Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Tuesday slammed the state government for its intolerance towards political opponents and misuse of law and order machinery to hide its failure.Reacting to the detention of BJP delegation at a police station to prevent entry into troubled Sambalpur town on Tuesday, Pradhan said Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik is not acting impartially as he is not aware of many things happening in the state.
Urging the chief minister to observe Rajdharma, the Union minister said the state police which utterly failed to maintain law and order situation in the state are behaving more like BJD workers. This is not a good sign for democracy, he added.
He said the Sambalpur violence was pre-planned. The Ministry of Home Affairs in its advisory to states including Odisha had indicated possible trouble in Sambalpur during Hanuman Jayanti. The kind of security arrangement that was made in the town clearly indicates that the state government had other plans in mind.
“The inefficiency of the state government is mainly responsible for the restive Sambalpur. After this incident, there are complaints that the state government is being biased,” he said. The state government is trying to hide its weakness by taking unilateral decisions. It is unfortunate that a Union minister, several MPs, MLAs and senior party leaders of BJP were detained despite prior permission to meet a party activist Damodar Kar, who is undergoing treatment after being critically injured in the violence.