As Naveen Patnaik bows out, selfies and a pep talk to leaders: ‘Will be around for you’

Over the last few days since the BJD’s loss, outgoing CM Patnaik has been meeting a steady stream of party candidates — both winners and those who lost — gamely posing with them for selfies, “motivating them not to get discouraged” and assuring them that he would be around for them.

“The CM told us what the government has done in 24 years and motivated us to keep working. He said he would be there for us and lead us from the front. He has given us directions on what to do and what not to do,” BJD’s organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das told The Indian Express after his meeting with Patnaik.

Outgoing Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik meets BJD MLAs as he leaves office after 24 years.

Of the 147 seats in the Odisha Assembly, the BJP won 78, reducing the BJD to 51, down from the 113 seats it won in 2019. Patnaik himself lost from Kantabanji, his first loss since his electoral debut in 1997, while registering a narrow win in Hinjili.

From Delhi socialite to ‘gentleman’ politician — Patnaik’s journey

Few expected the Doon School-educated, English-speaking Patnaik, who couldn’t utter more than a few words in Odia, to remain as long as he did in politics.

Known to be a soft-spoken socialite in New Delhi who stayed abroad most of his life and had once listed Mick Jagger, lead singer of the British rock band The Rolling Stones, and US ex-first lady Jacqueline Kennedy among his friends, Patnaik reluctantly stepped into politics following death of his father and former CM Biju Patnaik in April 1997 to win the parliamentary bypoll that year from Aska — his father’s seat — as a Janata Dal nominee.

File photo of Naveen Patnaik by Sanjay Kumar Sharma

Months later, he floated the BJD with his father’s loyalists. The party won nine seats in 1998 and 10 in the 1999 parliamentary polls, with Patnaik becoming a minister in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet both times.

In over two decades of politics, the mild-mannered Patnaik hardly encountered any major challenges, earning the reputation of being a gentleman politician, and an able administrator without the taint of corruption despite his long innings as chief minister.

His work in other sectors too made him popular. Patnaik, who assumed the charge in the aftermath of the 1999 Super Cyclone that killed over 10,000 people in the coastal districts, has been credited for rebuilding the state, initiating big-ticket infrastructure projects such as the 650-km long Biju Expressway, and turning Odisha from a food-deficit state to the third largest contributor to the country’s public distribution system pool.

His “cradle to grave” welfare schemes and measures such as reserving 50 percent seats in Panchayati Raj institutions and urban local bodies for women and announcing 33 percent reservation in Lok Sabha seats for them helped cement his reputation as a progressive leader and pro-people leader.

However, barring his innings as union minister, Patnaik, unlike his father, never tried to look beyond Odisha, keeping his politics confined to the state and ensuring good Centre-state relations, under both the UPA and the NDA governments.

His sharp political skills also came in handy when he successfully thwarted an “coup” by his late advisor Pyarimohan Mohapatra on May 29, 2012, while he was on an official visit to London. He cut the visit short to return to Bhubaneswar and took control over the BJD, cementing his position as the party’s undisputed leader.

Meanwhile, despite the now caretaker CM’s own incorruptible image, voters had been growing steadily disenchanted under his rule, especially in the light of the petty corruption that had allegedly become rampant at block-, tehsil- and police-station levels. Much of this anger was directed at local BJD leaders, who were accused of seeking bribes for ensuring government services.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Patnaik had dramatically reduced his public appearances, confining himself to his residence, Naveen Niwas, and even conducting his official affairs from there.

It was this period that saw V.K. Pandian, a former IAS officer who joined politics last November and has become a polarising figure in Odisha politics this election, emerged as the politician’s right-hand man.

V.K. Pandian, Patnaik, and the question of BJD’s future

Patnaik’s former private secretary and confidant, Pandian, the Tamil Nadu-born ex-IAS officer, became the focal point of the BJP’s attacks over the last few months, with the party even claiming at one point that from the keys of the ratna bhandar (treasure trove) at Puri’s famed Jagannath Temple to the reins of power in the state, everything was going to Tamil Nadu.

According to a bureaucrat, some successful schemes that make CM Patnaik popular as a pro-people leader are actually Pandian’s brainchild. Credit: CMO

Considered to be Patnaik’s “shadow” for the last couple of years, the former civil servant has been missing in action since the election results, not accompanying the former CM even when he went to Raj Bhawan on Wednesday to tender his resignation.

Amid growing voices of dissent within the party over Pandian’s growing influence and “sidelining” of senior party leaders in the party, Patnaik has formed a committee to look into the reasons for the BJD’s poll debacle.

On Saturday, in an interview to PTI and ANI that was released by the BJD media cell, Patnaik defended Pandian, calling the criticism against him “unfortunate” and that as an officer, he did “excellent work”.

In the last 10 years, Pandian has “helped with two cyclones and the Covid-19 epidemic in the state…He is a person of integrity and honesty and should be remembered for all that,” Patnaik said.

On a question on his successor, Patnaik said, “I have always clearly said about my successor… it’s not Mr Pandian and I repeat it again — that the people of Odisha will decide my successor.”

Pandian was a prominent presence when West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and her Bihar counterpart Nitish Kumar met Patnaik this year. Credit: CMO

According to party sources, at the recent meetings with Patnaik, BJD leaders have unanimously sought direct access to the chief minister and removal of the “invisible barrier” between them.

As he emerged from his meeting with Patnaik at Naveen Niwas in Bhubaneswar on June 6, senior leader Prafulla Samal, when asked about Pandian’s absence from the post-poll meetings, said, “what matters is the presence of Naveen Babu, no one else”. Six-time MLA Samal lost the Bhadrak Assembly seat to debutant Sitansu Sekhar Mohapatra of the BJP.

Mahesh Sahu, another senior BJD leader, said Pandian was a “general worker of the party like all of us, who was only assigned to look after the government’s schemes”.

On Pandian’s absence from the recent meetings, BJD organisational secretary Pranab Prakash Das said it was Patnaik’s prerogative to decide who to call for meetings.

Two days after Naveen Patnaik took oath as chief minister of Odisha for the fifth time in May 2019, a photo shared on social media showed V.K Pandian with him at his residence. Credit: CMO

Significantly, despite internal murmurings, most BJD leaders steer clear of blaming the loss on Pandian, instead attributing it to “election mismanagement” and “wrong candidate selection”. But Bhartruhari Mahtab, a former BJD leader who joined the BJP just before election and is now an MP-elect from Cuttack, believes his former party is no longer what it was.

“One person took all the decisions, managed the state and everything happened on his orders, which people (voters) did not like,” he said without naming anyone.

Meanwhile, since the loss, there have been questions about whether Patnaik – who, until the recent loss, had served for five straight terms and hadn’t lost a single election since his Lok Sabha debut in 1998 – will reconcile to sitting in the Opposition benches.