Suddenly there is a mild political turmoil in Odisha. A peculiar mix of greed and avarice coupled with a political turn of events. In which the key characters are a senior Indian Forest Officer and his upstart son, crossing all limits of ethics to make money to an unbelievable tune.

The episode gets more spiced by the alleged involvement of a senior leader and legislator of the Biju Janata Dal( BJD) who is suspected to be in league with the whole rot created by the forest officer and his son.

In their greed to acquire money in cash and kind, the father-son duo have allegedly pulverised many boundaries of commonsense spreading their empire from Odisha up to Mumbai, Pune and few other places.

What has added a twist to the bizarre development is the sudden expulsion of a Biju Janata Dal legislator and a former minister, Pradeep Panigrahi, for certain `anti-people` activities. And the timing of the sacking throws up questions as to whether it is distantly or intimately linked to the forest officer`s alleged misdeeds.

To begin with, the forest officer Abhay K Pathak, an IFS, and his son Akash K Pathak have been embroiled in a heady mix of politics and greed leading to an unseemly display of caprice to raise heckles in the political circles.

The reported amassing of wealth right from Odisha to Mumbai and Pune and so on, by Pathak, perhaps, needs no further elaboration. The use of chattered flights on several occasions by the Pathaks clearly unveils the unholy designs that had been adopted to reach up to that questionable level.

Was The Vigilance Dozing?

It was surely not a fly by night exercise that the Pathaks notched up their reach and acquisitions. It must have been for the last few years rather.

Then, where was the state`s Vigilance department? It was only after the Centre`s warning that the state-owned agencies woke up to a reality that was being perpetrated right under everyone`s` nose, including the district authority concerned.

Amid the rots that the Pathaks were in, the BJD legislator Panigrahi got mired in a disreputable controversy which alludes his association with the Pathaks.

However, in a hindsight injection of wisdom, the BJD rose to the occasion and discovered the devil within Panigrahi and expelled him from the party on ` anti-people ` activities as the letter of expulsion read.

Panigrahi Goes Berserk!

It may be a personal thing that, Panigrahi`s daughter and Akash Pathak were to marry each other soon. But after being expelled Panigrahi, in a feat of defensive ferocity, the latter not only spewed venom against the BJD leadership but was heard defending the senior Pathak as a `very good officer`.

And that was something enough to draw an assumption that, Panigrahi was somehow in league with the Pathaks and with their tin-pot empire.

The flash in the pan was when the  Tatas played the whistleblower role against Akash Pathak who allegedly masqueraded as the company`s managing director and collected humongous amounts of money from the local young job aspirants to get them employment in the company.

The Pathak duo now cools their heels in jail and the politician seems biting his lips only.

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