Will Odisha’s Outgoing CM Naveen Patnaik Be Able to Keep His Herd Together?

 Bhubaneswar:  Will the outgoing Odisha chief minister and Biju Janata Dal (BJD) president Naveen Patnaik be able to keep his herd together? Does he still hold his old charisma to instill courage and confidence in the minds of his MLAs and party leaders? These baffling questions are widely being discussed in political circles here.

The BJD lost power to the BJP in the assembly elections as it got only 51 of the 147 assembly seats, 64 less than its 2019 tally. The majority mark in Odisha Legislative Assembly is 74.

Though none of the senior leaders are forthcoming about the reasons of party’s debacle, many confide in private that Naveen’s over-reliance on bureaucrats, including Pandian, spelt disaster for the party. A few leaders openly blamed V Karthikeyan Pandian, a Tamil Nadu-born bureaucrat-turned BJD politician, for the party’s drubbing in the polls. They contend that Pandian, empowered by Naveen, regularly interfered in the state administration as well BJD affairs, leading to the rise in discontentment among the people against the establishment.

Naveen, who was brought up in Delhi, entered into Odisha politics in 1997, — a year after his father Biju Patnaik’s death, to head the newly formed Biju Janata Dal.

In 1998 and 1999, he was elected to Lok Sabha and became a Union minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. In 2000, he became chief minister of Odisha after his party, in alliance with the BJP, defeated the incumbent Congress government led by Janaki Ballav Patnaik.

Soon after becoming the CM Odisha, Naveen systematically ousted all the founder members of the BJD and ran the government with the help of retired and serving bureaucrats. In the process, all democratic voices in the BJD were eliminated. A few left-out democrats who survived Naveen’s Machiavellian politics, kept mum and reconciled to the new reality. They just complied with the whims and fancies of the bureaucrats who drew support and strength from Naveen.

Though the new herd of 51 BJD legislators has some strong leaders who can confront the BJP on the floor of the Assembly, many of them are not sure if Naveen would be able to provide them with the right kind of political insights to be vocal on issues concerning people’s interests.

The outgoing CM, who never made any extempore speech on the floor of the House and always read out written contents, will now desperately lack the luxury of bureaucratic support to face the treasury bench members in the Assembly.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had hammered on Naveen’s lack of subject knowledge when he dared him to tell the name of the headquarters of the 30 districts in the state and 10 villages of Kantabanji from where he was contesting assembly polls. Most of the BJD leaders also realise that it would be too difficult for them to bank on Naveen’s leadership at this moment as he has almost lost the support base of the intellectuals who don’t want to be identified with him for delegating the powers to bureaucrats, decimating the democratic elements in the party.

Prime Minister Modi, during the election campaign, has predicted an earthquake in the BJD within a few months after the polls.