There will be some special visitors to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Bhubhaneswar when he travels there this weekend for the BJP’s national executive.
Descendants of 16 families associated with a little-known but bloody rebellion against British colonialism, called the Paika rebellion of 1817 will be felicitated by the Prime Minister.
The symbolism of this event at a time when the party is trying to expand in Odisha and has done well in the local body polls has escaped no one.
The Paika rebellion had been flagged by the Modi government earlier as well, in Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s budget speech this year where he said that “two hundred years ago in 1817, a valiant uprising of soldiers led by Buxi Jagabandhu [Bidyadhar Mohapatra] took place in Khurda of Odisha. We will commemorate the same appropriately.”
Failed to get recognition
The rebellion, by the landed militia of Khurda called Paiks, predates the first war of independence in 1857 but did not get similar recognition.
It took place when the British East India company wrested the rent-free land that had been given to the Paiks for their military service to the Kingdom of Khurda.
BJP president Amit Shah, who, incidentally enrolled himself as a member of the BJP from Odisha during the digital enrolment drive held under his leadership has made no secret of the fact that he sees the “Coromandel coast” as an appropriate theatre of expansion for the party.
“We want to increase our numbers from these States,” Union Minister for Petroleum Dharmendra Pradhan, who is a key party leader from Odisha, said. This concentration on expansion in the east is to make up for any loss in west India and States like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which the BJP had swept in 2014.
Last week, there was a bit of a flutter in Odisha political circles when Biju Janata Dal (BJD) chief whip Tathagata Satpathy had accused the BJP, in a series of tweets, of trying to poach BJD MLAs with help from a BJD MP.
