SLOW LEARNER: Oriya is Patnaik's big worry

Language and politics are seldom apart in India. Naveen Patnaik, Orissa's non-Oriya speaking chief minister, has this lesson driven home each time a rival has a dig at his inability to speak the "language of the masses". His most recent critic is Union Tribal Affairs Minister Juel Oram, who triggered a micromini-crisis when he called Patnaik's Oriya ignorance "a shame as also an embarrassment".

Oram was duly upbraided by his BJP seniors for making ally Patnaik look silly. But he is not alone. "Oriya is Orissa's lifeline," explains Yudhistir Das, former assembly speaker and president of the Biswa Oriya Sammellani (World Oriya Council). Folks like him have been rendered a double whammy. Not only do they have a chief minister who can't speak the tongue of Kalinga but the state's elite is happily sending its children to English medium schools.

An incipient backlash may just be happening. In the recent panchayat elections, an obscure clause in the rulebook was dug out to prevent anybody who couldn't read or write Oriya from contesting. An agitation to incorporate Sareikla and Kharsaun, Oriya speaking areas in neighbouring Jharkhand, is brewing. Finally, Ama Odisha, an NGO run by Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, former chief minister J.B. Patnaik's journalist son-in-law, is running a mass programme to promote Oriya as language and identity.

Ama Odisha conducts statewide Oriya proficiency tests. In five years, already half a million children have taken these. A certain aesthete, who reads Oriya speeches written in Roman script, hasn't.

-Ruben Banerjee

OBITUARY

MANU CHHABRIA 1946-2002

Manohar ("Manu") Rajaram Chhabria, who died of a heart attack in Mumbai on April 6, was a maverick of the corporate world. He had a modest beginning in the family shop of electrical goods on Mumbai's Lamington Road and later slogged it out in West Asia. He made his millions by marketing the products of Sony through his Dubai-based distribution network, Jumbo Electronics. Chhabria exploded on the Indian scene in the 1980s as a "takeover tycoon", a sobriquet that haunted the Sindhi businessman till the end of his 56 years.

With the brashness of a parvenu and an overstuffed wallet, Chhabria faced little resistance as he gobbled up some of the best companies of the colonial era: Shaw Wallace, Dunlop India, Mather & Platt and Hindustan Dorr Oliver. Troubles began when he failed to manage them. Those who helped him in the acquisitions turned away from him, or became enemies.

Mired in litigation due to financial mismanagement of Shaw Wallace and the threat of criminal prosecution, he left for Dubai in 1996. It was only after FERA changed into a less harsh FEMA that he returned to India. In his last months, Chhabria was bubbling with ideas for expanding Shaw Wallace's liquor business. It's left to his wife Vidya and three daughters to implement them.

-Sumit Mitra

CLASH OF CAUSES: Patkar(above) vs Jogi

Plant of Discord

The bone of contention: the proposed Rs 3,500-crore National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC)'s steel plant in Nagarnar, part of Chhattisgarh's Bastar district. Activist Medha Patkar has accused the state Government of acquiring 11,000 hectares of land for the plant by "terrorising tribals into accepting compensation" and damaging Bastar's environment.

But Chief Minister Ajit Jogi says 292 of the 303 affected families have accepted a compensation package that includes thrice the market value of the land and a job at the plant. The project, insists Jogi, will check pollution. It will use the ore dust from the NMDC's iron ore mines, now choking the rivers of the region, and turn it into steel. Over to Ms Patkar.

-Neeraj Mishra