Dr. Manoj Dash, Bhubaneswar, 7 August 2024
The newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Government in Odisha is set to complete sixty days in office after getting elected in the 2024 elections. The popular Biju Janata Dal (BJD) Chief Minister (CM) of Odisha, Naveen Patnaik, conceded defeat gracefully. Naveen ruled Odisha as its CM for 24 years but his personal dream to strike a record got shattered.
Many political observers wondered whether Patnaik would choose to hang around in Odisha to infuse new energy into his depleted party and try another stint in power. Naveen proved all such speculations wrong and decided to continue in Odisha as the Leader of Opposition (LoP) which is an important position in a democratic set up. He made certain changes in the BJD which was badly required. However, his choice of making a former corporate honcho from the Aditya Birla Group (ABG) his political secretary refueled further speculations whether he has again decided to lean on someone else while plotting a revival and survival plan for his party. Incidentally, a specific company of the ABG group was one of the biggest funders of BJD in the electoral bond era, information regarding which became public after a landmark Supreme Court judgment on the issue. The presence of a former corporate boss in Naveen’s team is hurting the political prospects of BJD to a great extent.
Let’s evaluate whether BJD can manage a comeback to power in 2029 by looking at different aspects of the emerging and ever-changing political landscape in Odisha. No doubt, the BJD has enough funds in its party’s coffers to plot a revival. Is this factor strong enough to ensure its revival?
The first and foremost challenge on the road ahead is the inability of Naveen Patnaik to engage with the ordinary Odia folks. He hasn’t enabled himself to enter into a direct conversation with common people because he never learnt the Odia language. Power works as a great multiplier to engage with people through schemes and other funding possibilities that attract people to establish a good connect. In the absence of power, one has to talk to people, be among them on various occasions, and motivate oneself to go to the masses often, so that the direct connect is maintained well. Naveen has been a lazy politician who never went to the field on political tours as the CM and as his party’s President. Now that he is not in power, there are no government programmes to work to his advantage. Hence, political tours and events that could help him re-establish contact remain a potential tool. This is not happening at all because of a lack of personal willingness in him to visit people and also because he doesn’t have necessary physical agility to do so.
The second impediment is the Pandian baggage. Enough information is available on V.K.Pandian’s misadventures to corner power in Odisha through a cosy cartel of bureaucrats, politicians, business persons, and contractors that he could form because of his proximity to Naveen. The very fact that Naveen Pattnaik allowed Pandian to wield too much power worked to his party’s detriment. Naveen never responded to speculations that sprang up in the public domain regarding Pandian’s ambitions and attempts to usurp power. People inside the BJD endured the pain that was inflicted by Pandian on them because Naveen played an active role in getting his political colleagues cornered, marginalized, and humiliated. People who mattered in Odisha also voiced their concern regularly which never prompted Naveen to allay people’s fear that power in Odisha would never fall into the hands of a back-office bureaucrat who was unleashing all the weapons available to the government, which were desperately deployed and leveraged to ensure continuance in power. Even after this interloper caused Patnaik’s political downfall and brought him huge humiliation at the hands of BJP’s ruthless politicians during the campaign phase, Naveen went on to defend his former Private Secretary in public stating that he holds Pandian in high regard. In the world of politics, it is not of much importance how highly Naveen holds a former bureaucrat. What Naveen doesn’t contemplate is, what his political colleagues think of Pandian and what ordinary Odias also think of him. Naveen’s political colleagues have nothing but a high level of disdain against Pandian who was instrumental in sidelining them. People in Odisha treat Pandian as a backroom manipulator who has destroyed the bureaucratic fabric and sanctity in Odisha. They view him as a corrupt bureaucrat who worked for a political party while drawing his salary and perks from the public exchequer. People also think of him as a supporter of Tamil contractors who cornered a lot of wealth with his tacit support and approval that took away opportunities from the hands of Odias. Hence, the act of Naveen defending Pandian causes far greater political alienation which is, unfortunately, not being appreciated well by Naveen. This causes great harm to the future political fortunes of BJD in staging a comeback.
The third roadblock is the depleted capacity of political colleagues of Naveen Patnaik. Naveen kept on appointing himself as the BJD President which may be good for satisfying his own ego, but does not augur well for the party to grow necessary political muscle and strength. In order to make himself look more powerful, he either got the strength of his political colleagues drastically reduced through a handful of bureaucrats or he chose such political colleagues who didn’t have a strong presence in the different constituencies and never had the chance of expressing their opinion in the public. It was Naveen who got all votes for them because others didn’t have the capability to attract votes and a few who had the capability were deliberately decapacitated. Hence, real political power of BJD always remained stagnant which was not visible because of the party’s continuance in power. The depleted state of political muscle of BJD needs great care and time to rebuild. Consequently, it would take time fir the BJD to achieve stealth and striking capability.
Another drawback is that most of those who have been elected to the Odisha Legislative Assembly (OLA) from the BJD in 2024 elections, are not capable enough to effectuate a big change in the political fortunes of their party. Naveen can only blame his strategy of excessively leaning on bureaucrats to manage governance and politics. This constant dependence didn’t help build the necessary skills and capabilities in the party’s leaders to develop the grey matter as well as the fighting spirit required to help the party force its way back to power. They are neither able to showcase the party’s past performance to grow political capital nor do they have the capacity to defend the weak points of their government which they didn’t address during their long stint in power (for example, the shortage of potato and the surge in its price in Odisha). The net result is, the BJD is not able to display enough political resilience on the floor of the OLA that is required to checkmate a stealthy political juggernaut called the BJP.
Another source of setback for the BJD is that a significant source of BJD’s political power was Biju Patnaik’s personal charisma which was milked to the maximum during the party’s lengthy stay in power. It has been so badly used that there is no more residual stamina left in the name. Biju’s name stands hugely overused and depleted. Therefore, the opportunities of relying on his name to resurrect political fortunes stand totally nullified. The final blow was dealt by Pandian who removed Biju’s image from party’s posters in order to project himself as the new centre of power. His supporters, who saw nothing but a non-existent miracle in Pandian to capture power, have stymied Biju’s influence on the minds of ordinary Odias. Biju’s name has lost its sheen due to excessive use by the BJD and its members.
BJD’s chances are also getting badly affected by speculations that keep surfacing repeatedly in politics. The stealthy manner in which Pandian operated always generated a lot of conspiracy theories around his life, his inexplicable influence on Naveen, the nature of his relationship with Naveen, and many other factors that are still causing a bad influence on the psyche of Odias and BJD’s followers. Overenthusiastic supporters of Pandian, which included many top BJD politicians, never wasted any time in projecting Pandian as a big man which he never was! Pandian’s brainchild 5T included ‘transparency’ which was conspicuously absent in the manner in which he conducted himself. Hence, he was forced to take retirement from politics which he himself had announced in public in the event of Naveen not returning to power in 2024. Nobody knows what he is doing now. On one hand, his total disappearance from the public view has political ramifications for BJD. On the other, his ominous presence on the social media and continuous flow of statements that get generated from his X handle and Instagram account are severely hurting the political strength of the party. In addition, Naveen’s steady refusal to dump him from the political discourse is exacerbating internal bleeding in the party’s physical ecosystem which is constantly being undermined by Naveen to BJD’s disadvantage.
Another source of weakness is BJD’s inability to project itself as a regional political alternative. It has been so friendly with the BJP in the past for many unknown reasons that there is great confusion about the real identity of BJD as a political entity. It always used to drum up the much maligned concept of “Centre’s apathy” to keep its regional identity afloat. However, either due to pressure from the top leadership of BJP or due to its own compulsions, BJD kept on supporting the BJP in matters that were indefensible and were highly undemocratic in essence. Hence, people have lost their faith in BJD as a viable regional power entity in order to genuinely highlight regional aspirations, genuine neglect, and constant apathy that gets regularly meted out by the national parties that have remained in power at the Centre during BJD’s rule in Odisha. Hence, people in Odisha have started looking for a new regional alternative and even some are looking at the Congress party to occupy the political vacuum created after the 2024 elections.
Lastly, but not in the least, can the BJD outsmart BJP’s stealth, smartness, and superiority in playing its political games successfully? BJP doesn’t have enough bench strength in the OLA although it has won a simple majority in the 2024 elections. It desperately needs more people in its fold so that it has a level of majority in the OLA that would give it unmatched political strength that the BJD used to enjoy previously. BJP has already started poaching politicians from the BJD’s camp starting with a sitting MP of Rajya Sabha who resigned from her post and quickly joined the BJP. It finds an easier target in the BJD’s sitting members in the OLA and it knows that it can achieve quick success there. In its usual style of poaching members from rival camps, BJP is working hard on taking away MLAs of BJD in the OLA and it has already made an elaborate plan in which two influential Union Ministers from Odisha are said to be directly involved. BJP wants to completely deplete BJD of all its political strength so that the latter can never make a comeback. BJP also sees in BJD a mightier enemy than the Congress party in the context of Odisha’s politics. Will the BJD be able to survive the dirty onslaughts of BJP? Will it be able to scale the stiff challenges that it faces from within and outside its own party? The chances look very bleak unless it adopts a very different strategy to engineer a sharp upward movement in its fortunes.
