How Naveen Patnaik charted Odisha's remarkable turnaround, once India's most backward state
After 17 years in power, what more does Patnaik need to do to win a fifth term?
Naveen Patnaik is an oddity in Indian politics. The Odisha Chief Minister fights shy of the limelight. When he does venture out to a public function he wants a minimum of fuss. At the recent launch of the mascot for the Asian Athletics Championship to be held in Bhubaneshwar, Patnaik feebly waved to the youth that had gathered to greet him. He then read out a short statement in English. (He still does not speak Oriya fluently and makes seriously boring speeches that are mercifully short). He could have boasted that Odisha had taken on the responsibility of organising the meet at short notice after neighbouring Jharkhand had backed off. But Patnaik is too much the gentleman. He cursorily displayed the T-shirt being released for the occasion and dropped it on the table before the press could take a good shot. He didn't shake hands with the mascot (Ollie, the Ridley turtle) something that would have been a hit with the crowds. He then got into his car - a compact no frills Suzuki Sx4 bought by the state government six years ago - and sped off to attend a conference of district collectors at the Secretariat convened to review progress of major government programmes.
At that meeting Patnaik was the master of ceremonies. Seated on a wooden chair midst his ministers and officers, he told them, " I want you all to observe the 3 Ts - encourage Team spirit, ensure Transparency and effectively use Technology to provide last mile delivery of services to people. " As the officers made presentations, ranging from the condition of construction workers, to road connectivity and construction of tube-wells, the chief minister listened attentively. He then asked a few searching questions before he opened it out for discussion. At the end of the conference, he spoke briefly to the press and with his characteristic bluntness said he had ordered his bureaucrats to put an early end to the 'PC' culture. Abbreviation for Percentage of Commission, the PC culture is said to be prevalent among lower rung officials who demand a percentage cut for government works being undertaken at the block level.
Opposition parties immediately pounced on his remark calling it an admission of guilt by Patnaik and demanded that a Lok Ayukta Act be passed urgently to end the PC culture. Patnaik though remained unfazed by the criticism as he settled down soon the same evening for an interview with India Today his sparse office inside the secretariat. His office is a statement by itself. He refused to have his office chair refurbished though the leather seat is fraying at the edges. Nor has he changed the floor tiling saying the money is better spent on development works for the people of the state. His desk has a small portrait of his late father, Biju Patnaik, a former chief minister of the state, and a respected national leader. Next to it is a faded picture of Mahatma Gandhi. A note pad on his table shows one of his intricate doodles apart from a drawing of a potted plant. The aroma of cigarette smoke permeates the air - the chief minister like to occasionally smoke a cigarette. He gets comfortable by slipping his feet into Hawaii chappals placed next to his leg rest.
When he speaks, it is with precision and shorn of any embellishment. He exudes an aura of quiet confidence and strength. Now into his fourth consecutive term, he has completed 17 years in the saddle and has joined the list of the longest serving chief ministers of the country. (The late Jyoti Basu holds the record of being 23 years at the helm in West Bengal). The Biju Janata Dal (BJD), the party he formed after his father died in 1997, has grown in strength. In 2014, at the height of the Narendra Modi wave, the BJD won a whopping 117 of the 147 seats and all but made a clean sweep of the Lok Sabha seats winning 20 of the 21 seats allocated to the state. Yet the repeated electoral success have only made him more humble and even more reticent. Why does he prefer to keep such a low profile? His cryptic reply: "I think what is important is that my work speaks for itself." ( See interview)
It does indeed. When Patnaik took over in 2000, Odisha had the country's highest poverty level at 59 per cent of the population with Kalahandi being its darkest spot. By 2012, the latest figures available, the poverty level was down to almost half - 32.5 per cent - the highest reduction in poverty among all Indian states during that period. Under him Odisha's economic progress has been impressive. The state's GDP grew an average of 6.66 per cent annually in the past five years and fiscal prudence was maintained. Per capita income has grown six fold and touched Rs 66,890 last year. Odisha imported rice from Punjab and Haryana when Patnaik took over. It now produces surplus rice that it exports to the rest of the country. Its anti-poverty programmes and welfare schemes for women have been emulated by the rest of India. (See graphics)
There is more. With tribes forming 22 per cent of its population, among the highest in the country, Patnaik has focused on improving their lot by providing road connectivity, better housing, electricity, education and skill development. In disaster management, it won world admiration in 2013 when, in the face of the extremely severe cyclone storm Phailin, it evacuated 1 million people from the danger area with casualty figures being minimal. Odisha has also shown rapid industrial growth and attracts among the highest amounts of investment annually in diversified sectors. Said a senior bureaucrat, "He has got us into the winning habit. We are no more defeatist. We have 21st century aspirations."
Quite remarkable for someone who considers himself as an accidental chief minister. Patnaik was the youngest of the three children of Biju and Gyan Patnaik. His father participated in the freedom struggle and new Jawaharlal Nehru well. He was also skilled pilot and founded his own airlines, Kalinga, which was merged into Indian Airlines when civil aviation was nationalised in 1953. His father showed derring-do by rescuing two key Indonesian Independence leaders at Nehru's request. Patnaik or Pappu, as he was known then, studied in Doon School and one of his classmates was Sanjay Gandhi. ("Sanjay was mechanically inclined while I was always attracted to the arts," he said). His sister, Gita Mehta, a well-known writer, recalls that as a young man, Naveen, was gregarious and a sophisticate. He had opened a boutique at the Oberoi Hotel in Delhi called PsycheDelhi along with Martand Singh and his clientele included the Beatles.
Patnaik's interest in art and culture drew him into the charmed circle of the rich and famous including Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis who edited two of his books A Second Paradise: Indian Country Life 1590-1947 and The Garden of Life (Herbal plants of India). Though they lived in his father's sprawling bungalow on Aurangzeb Road, Patnaik was always austere refusing to change his battered Fiat despite insistence from friends including Kennedy. His parents kept him and his siblings as far away as politics as they could. But Gita recalls that Naveen was always inspired by a deep sense of social justice. When his father passed away in 1997, the mantle of continuing his political legacy fell on Patnaik, then 50 years old. He formed the BJD and was elected an MP from his father's constituency in Aska. He said, "I had inherited my father's responsibilities, not privileges. One of the members of his family had to continue his legacy of social responsibility." Patnaik then was known more for the parties he threw than party work. The BJD was part of the ruling NDA alliance headed by AB Vajpayee and Patnaik was made Union Minister for Mines. In the 2000 Odisha assembly elections, the BJD trounced the ruling Congress and won 68 of the 147 seats, just five short of the majority. Patnaik resigned from the Union Ministry, formed an alliance with the BJP in Odisha and took over as Chief Minister. He admits that he knew very little about the state and had to learn on the job. But as Gita observed, "Like our father he had a capacity to go the lion's den without a weapon." The Odisha he took charge was a minefield with JB Patnaik, the Congress Chief Minister he succeeded, leaving behind a state riven by poverty, corruption and mafia dons. Naveen told friends that on his first meeting with ministers and bureaucrats of the state he was repelled by their obsequious behaviour and observed that their only interest was to find out, "what was my price." But if they thought that Patnaik would be a pushover, they were in for a mighty surprise. He was determined "to clean the Augean stables" as he put it (Patnaik always had a good sense of history) and also focus on tackling the appalling poverty that had beset the state. And he went out about it with both a political astuteness and a ruthlessness that surprised even those who knew him. Gita recalled almost overnight Naveen shut out his life in Delhi and his feudal moorings. For him it was a closed chapter - a binary shift. He moved into Naveen Niwas that his father built near the Odisha airport occupying the servant quarters instead of the main building which he converted to his residential office. He lived a life of austerity wearing only simple white kurta-pyjamas. He then focussed on setting right the finances of the state and on anti-poverty programmes. He was fanatically against corruption and sacked ministers or bureaucrats if he got wind of any misdemeanour. In the first term, he was known as Mr Clean but was still to come grips with both the party and the government. When he was re-elected for the second term in 2004 by retaining his alliance with the BJP, it was widely accepted that he had emerged as a politician in his own right and was no more dependent on his father's legacy. By the start of his third term with industries like Tatas and Poscos flocking to his state, he was known as both Mr Clean and Mr Development.
He came truly into his own, by deciding to break his the alliance with the BJP over the 2009 Kandhamal riots. The BJD contested the elections without any seat sharing arrangements and won a clear majority. But Patnaik still had to fight battles for supremacy within his own party. In 2012, he ousted his political adviser, Pyarimohan Mohatpatra who had tried to engineer a coup by fomenting an internal revolt. It was after that the Naveen mystique became firmly established. He was perceived by his people as sincere and clean and someone deeply committed to the development of Odisha. He kept his cards close to his chest and was unpredictable in his actions. He would drop ministers even at the whiff of a scandal not fearing for the political consequences. He gave the bureaucrats a free hand to run the state and encouraged them to come up with innovative solutions.
To make the state administration more transparent he used technology to put all government files and tenders online including a tracking system where the public could find out where exactly the file was held up. He also showed a lot of heart while evolving development programmes. A pregnant woman working as a labourer till the final week of pregnancy moved him to set up the Mamata scheme to provide both monetary and medical help to take care of mothers during their critical months. When he found that tribal children were not getting into good public schools, he created hostel facilities and scholarships to ensure that a large number of them would be educated in reputed institutions. Most importantly he held frequent reviews and personally monitored the major programmes pulling up those who didn't deliver. When district collectors were unable to utilise the funds to dig tubewells for drinking water because of technical manpower shortage, Patnaik ordered that the engineering department staff in each district be made accountable to the collector rather than just to the chief engineer ensuring greater coordination between them.
All these brought him enviable success including winning the 2014 assembly elections with a handsome majority and sweeping the Lok Sabha seats in the state. But there are signs that anti-incumbency is setting in. In the recent Panchayat elections, although the ruling BJD won two thirds of the seats, the BJP, which won a third of the seats, saw its vote share shoot up from 16 per cent to 32 per cent. In doing so, the BJP displaced the Congress as the main Opposition party and can pose a threat to the BJD in the 2019 Assembly elections when Patnaik makes a bid for a fifth consecutive term. Dharmendra Pradhan, a Union Minister of state and a prominent BJP leader from Odisha, says, "The writing is in the wall for BJD and Naveen Patnaik. His is a failed government. It is stagnant, corrupt and lacks vision. The chief minister is just a mask and no more in control - a small coterie of bureaucrats and ministers run the government. His days are numbered." While that maybe a bombastic claim, there are signs that the BJP is emerging as a credible alternative.Concerned by the decline, criticism has also come from within the party. Jay Panda, a prominent BJD MP, called for a deep introspection stating that there are allegations that the government is run by bureaucrats, that corruptions charges are increasing and the party was alienating the youth. A furious Patnaik removed Panda as the party spokesman and defended his government's track record. But the electoral setback and the dissenting voices has galvanised him into action. He effected a major reshuffle recently where he dropped several tainted ministers and also drafted some of the better ones for party work. He is making a conscious effort to connect to the youth by holding rallies. At one such rally in Balasore he talked about the government's skill development programme and other benefits for the youth. He is getting his ministers, MLAs and local body leaders to be more deeply involved in developmental work. He is more on social media than ever before and takes time out to brief the press on his actions.
Patnaik still remains by far the tallest leader of the state. He remains unwaveringly focussed on the development of the state and pursues it with relentless zeal. He has no ambitions to move to the centre and challenge Narendra Modi. Or foist one of his relatives as his successor. His frugal lifestyle ensures that he has a squeaky clean reputation though some of his ministers and MLAs are now dogged with charges of scandals and scams. There are concerns expressed about his autocratic behaviour, his over reliance on a coterie of bureaucrats and the lack of strong second line of leadership. Also that he has become even more reclusive than before only warming up to his two dogs, Bruno and Roxy, his sister, Gita, had got for him. But Patnaik remain unfazed by such criticism. He says the lessons of the office have taught him to be "attentive to the requirements of the people, to always keep your ears open to their problems and try to deal with them as effectively as he can." If Patnaik follows his simple but effective mantra and sets his party in order, a fifth term should come his way.
With Maneesh Pandey