Skip to main content

Pimping a la Patel

 

Courtesy Nala Ponnappa

Praful Khoda Patel has made pimping an art. He knows how to sell India piece by piece to certain clients who have high connections. He sold Daman and Diu to CG Corp Global in 2018. Now he is selling Lakshadweep to other VIP clients. Thousands of indigenous people are displaced by him with impunity because he is acting on behalf of the central government which reportedly has “dreams for the people”.

This Patel is a phenomenon. His father, Khodabhai Ranchhodbhai Patel (a mouthful of a name) was an RSS leader whom Narendra Modi regarded as a guru. Our man became an MLA in Gujarat in 2007 and took over the entire charges of Amit Shah when the latter went to jail for arranging the encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheik. Now you can understand the ‘greatness’ of this phenomenal Patel. No ordinary man can take the place of Amit Shah under Narendra Modi.

The people of Gujarat failed to perceive that greatness, however, and Patel lost the 2012 election. But soon Modi became the PM and Patel was elevated to prominent places. Modi junked the convention of appointing IAS people as administrators of Union Territories and put Patel in Daman & Diu and soon extended his ominous power to Dadra & Nagar-Haveli.

Wherever he was, Patel was hated actively by ordinary people as well as his own party men. BJP leaders have complained against him time and again. As many as eight leaders have quit BJP in Lakshadweep now protesting against Patel’s reforms in the islands. Hundreds of simple fisherfolk in Daman now live in slums, thanks to Patel who bulldozed their homes and gave their lands to somebody who came from somewhere. He is doing just the same in Lakshadweep.

Patel’s aura was so powerful that it drove the Dadra & Nagar-Haveli MP to suicide in 2021. Though Patel was specifically mentioned in the suicide note as responsible for the ‘injustice, insult and bias’ that drove the MP to the extreme step, the law did not deem it necessary to take action against the great man.

If a Parliamentarian cannot survive Patel’s tyranny, how can simple fisherfolk do? Patel is selling Lakshadweep in the name of tourism. There is hardly any place left in those islands for developing tourism.

Is it about tourism really? Patel brought the pandemic to the islands with his villainous plans. He brought alcohol to the islands. He stole the people’s food, especially the school children’s. 200-odd schoolteachers were dismissed summarily. He closed down dairy farms. He threw the local people out of jobs. Even the sub-divisional magistrates were thrown out and Patel’s North-Indian chamchas have been appointed in their place.

Isn’t Patel a phenomenon?

Patel is the New India’s phenomenal metaphor. He is the pimp between the government and the corporate trader.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 376: Write a post on the phenomenon called Praful Khoda Patel. #PrafulKhodaPatel

Comments

  1. This is shocking! Is there no light at the end of the tunnel for this country?...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My prediction is that we're moving towards full dictatorship. In March 2014,i had predicted that Modi would ruin India.

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    My heart is rent asunder at the path government has taken in India... I had seen the early signs, even as I resided there. It is a fascist path, there is no denying it. And that it is done in the name of "Hinduism" is a scandal beyond words.

    Sadly, in my beloved Australia, there is also such a buffoon - though nothing as overt... and equally here in the UK. I am at a loss to understand, when we have come so far, that the world has turned back on itself and so many have built a 'them versus us' wall around themselves. That leaders think themselves beyond touching... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's surprising that many countries are turning fascist in varying degrees. The basic reason is greed. Religion has nothing to do with it. People like Modi misuse religion for ulterior motives because they know it's the easiest thing to do in India.

      Delete
  3. It's shocking that 21st century leaders are the near incarnation of Hitler& Mussolini. Citizens of India should be aware of their peril existence in the clutches of BJP and RSS. Let's join hands to bring these distorters down.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, India should unite against these frauds who masquerade as nationalists.

      Delete
  4. While the world is moving ahead , we are walking backwards .
    Dropping our own people towards a never ending dark tunnel ,oops I see a light "Vikaas'!2024!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Vikas for certain people is creation of hell where paradise existed.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...