The Nirvik Bureau, Bhubaneswar, 5th July 2026
The BJP government in Odisha completed two years in power recently. Its track record has been very mediocre with the biggest casualty being the law & order situation in the state. Every other day there are violent crimes being committed across the state and the government appears incompetent to stem the rot.
Apart from the deteriorating law & order situation, there are failures in most areas of governance. None more prominent and humiliating for all Odias than the textbooks fiasco. We have all seen with horror the kind of blunders made in the new textbooks for students in class 1 to 8 in government schools. Odisha and Odias are facing ridicule across the country for this gross ineptitude of the BJP government in Odisha.
In such a situation, one would have expected to see the main opposition party, BJD, making life miserable for the Chief Minister and the government. But that has hardly been the case in the last two years. The BJD has been in turmoil since it unexpectedly lost the 2024 elections and that could be a reason for its ineffective role as the leading opposition party. But is that the real reason? Is there something else that’s forcing this lacklustre performance of the BJD?
Let us take you back to the period 2019-2024. While the BJD kept on saying that it remains equidistant from the BJP and the INC, its actions belied those statements. During that 5-year period, about half a dozen controversial bills introduced by the BJP government at the Centre could not have cleared the Rajya Sabha without the BJD’s support. The BJD stood solidly behind the BJP even for Bills that deserved to be defeated. Hence, it showed its unflinching loyalty towards the Modi government. And how can we forget the desperate, yet unsuccessful, bid by the party to stitch an alliance with the BJP for the 2024 elections? Equidistance be damned! The BJD had trapped itself in such a tight embrace with the BJP between 2019-2024 that it could not fight against the latter with intensity during the 2024 polls. Now again it finds itself unable to fight the BJP government in Odisha post the 2024 polls. Their close relationship during 2019-2024, for reasons best known to both the parties, is the real reason for reducing the BJD to a toothless opposition.
The INC, which has been in opposition for 26 years now, has been a bigger disappointment. In all these years, it could not build a narrative either against the 24-year rule of Naveen Patnaik or the 2-year rule of Mohan Majhi. The internal squabbles within the party have succeeded in making the organisation weak and the voters aloof. While the INC and Rahul Gandhi are making inroads in many states, Odisha seems to be unimpacted.
With both the opposition parties unable to play their roles effectively, the Mohan Majhi government can continue to misgovern till the people of Odisha decide to take matters into their hands (or should we say fingers?!).
