By Sandeep Sahu
52 is no age to die for anyone, least of all a political leader there are hundreds of people ready to give their right arms for. His mentor JB Patnaik, who died a year and half before him at the ripe old age of 88, would have been proud of the crowd that thronged his Bhubaneswar residence soon after news of his death spread on Sunday night or lined the streets as his body was being taken from the airport to his residence on Monday evening.
Lalatendu Bidyadhar Mohapatra, fondly called ‘Lulubhai’ by people even years elder to him, was the eternal fighter in the political arena – always game for a showdown, always leading from the front. He conceived the ‘egg attack’ on ministers of the Naveen Patnaik government, including the Chief Minister himself, last year and was not apologetic about it at all. In fact, when confronted by the media on the issue, he actually threatened of more such attacks! And when the ruling party threatened to pay him back in the same coin, he dared them to go ahead, threatening to make coming out of home difficult for them!! And all this was after two crippling accidents had left him barely able to walk. That was Lulu Mohapatra for you.
Descendant of the legendary Buxi Jagabandhu, who led the Paika rebellion of Khurda in the early 19th century, Lulu was a hero for a whole generation of youth, not all of them from his party. The man who began his political career from student politics in the early 1980s towered over politics in the college and university campus. It is a measure of the support and clout he wielded in the campus that the Students’ Congress held on to the students’ union in Utkal University, the premier university in the state, even as the Naveen juggernaut swept away everything that came in its way in the rest of the state – till the BJD engineered mass defections to get even last year.
Lulu was among a handful of leaders whose appeal cut across party lines, as was evident in the number of leaders from other parties who converged on his residence in Bhubaneswar and his ancestral village of Gadarodanga to pay their last respects to him. More importantly, he was among the even fewer leaders who enjoyed pan-Odisha support, something that even his mentor JB Patnaik could not boast of. From Koraput to Mayurbhanj and from Puri to Sundargarh, there was no place in the state where he did not have a legion of admirers.
It is amazing how someone like him, who gave a damn to political correctness, enjoyed such abundant admiration from friends and foes. In a political culture where ‘doubletalk’ is the accepted norm, he believed in speaking his mind, never mincing words. In a party where the mere mention of the ‘high command’ made people to grovel, he did not spare even this most feared entity. He was blunt to the point of being abrasive. But in a phenomenon that has not yet been adequately explained, his plainspeak endeared him to others even more. Lulu was not a great orator or an overly articulate person. But he more than made up by the sincerity and honesty with which he spoke what he lacked in terms of the gift of the gab.
As is the case with a true leader, his clout was independent of political and electoral office. Despite losing two back-to-back elections in Brahmagiri, his karmabhoomi, he was the man the BJD feared most in the Congress. With the exception of Biju Patnaik, it is hard to think of another leader from any political party who enjoyed the kind of support he did and the kind of fear he evoked in the rival camp without holding any office.
His organisational abilities were legendary, as were his crisis management skills that came to the fore on innumerable occasions – most recently during the Rajya Sabha elections in 2014 when Ranjib Biswal won against all odds. All he had to do was to give a call and a crowd of thousands would gather at the venue for a political rally. It was he who masterminded the stunning comeback for his party in the 1995 Assembly elections, which also marked his entry to the august House.
To say that the Congress, riven as it is by factionalism, would miss him badly is to state the obvious. Now that he is not around to lead from the front, the possibility of any revival in the fortunes of the beleaguered party ahead of the 2019 elections looks even more remote than it ever did.