Naveen Patnaik (Pappu to his friends, and he has many) may be looking at a third term as Chief Minister of Orissa. In the last 11 years, he has lost touch with many of his friends from his earlier life, some of whom lament that he is a changed man. The man who once thought nothing of taking off to New York at a day’s notice, who counted Mick Jagger and Jackie Onassis as his friends, drank tea at Fortnum & Mason’s and shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue, is now not sure if his passport is still valid. He says he hasn’t had a holiday in nine years, so busy is he with the affairs of Orissa, the state which is one of India’s poorest, but which attracts investment in billions of dollars.
Welham Boys and Doon School prepared him for little other than being a gentleman around town. His friends at Doon remember him as a shy but charming boy with beautiful hands: he was a gifted painter with a deep interest in history, and absolutely none in politics—although he belonged to an intensely political family. His father, Biju Patnaik, remains one of Orissa’s best-known politicians, an irascible, wealthy socialist who liked fine wines and cigars as much as liberty and equality, and who still has a larger-than- life image amongst his people.
But nowhere in their upbringing was there ever a hint that any of Biju’s children—Naveen, brother Prem and sister Gita who is a renowned writer—would embrace politics. That change came about only when Biju Patnaik died and Naveen contested elections from his father’s Lok Sabha constituency, Aska, in 1998. He founded the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and focused on consolidating the regional party’s base.
When the BJD–BJP coalition came to power in 2000, it had to do very little to establish its credentials. There were so many corruption charges against the outgoing Congress government led by J B Patnaik that when Naveen Patnaik began a clean-up operation, which included putting bureaucrats behind bars, it took very little effort to earn for his government the image of a corruption-free administration.
It is from Chandrababu Naidu’s experience that Patnaik decided how to run his state government, or how not to. He realised Naidu had grabbed mindspace with his IT and other urban initiatives. Patnaik decided he would replicate Naidu’s work but instead of talking IT, he would talk rural development. That would ensure he did not get the wrong political image. Bhubaneswar was never an IT centre, but Patnaik has gone out of his way to attract firms like Infosys to the city, making it something like a boom town, with commercial rents that match the big metros. Ironically, however, Patnaik’s plans too seem to be going awry. In his current (second) term as Chief Minister, Patnaik has sought to develop large-scale industry in the state—but many projects have got stuck because of opposition from local people whose land is being acquired. Meanwhile, the Naxalite (or Maoist) challenge is growing, as the Maoists expand their base faster in Orissa than in any other state. Kidnappings are now a growing problem, while the recent violence against Christians (in the wake of the killing of a Hindu leader) has brought the state into focus for all the wrong reasons.
Patnaik’s strength remains in the fact that the state Congress has not been able to mount a credible challenge. And, he himself has a clean image and is now something more than just Biju Patnaik’s son.
©Business Standard. Excerpted from Business Standard Political Profiles: Of Cabals and Kings, by Aditi Phadnis. Published by Business Standard Books in 2009; available in bookshops and also on www.business-standard.com/books. For more details, contact vineeta.rai@bsmail.in
The book carries detailed profiles of: Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, L K Advani, Pranab Mukherjee, Prakash Karat, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi, Jayalalithaa Jayaram; Amar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Raj Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray, Rajnath Singh, P Chidambaram, Jaswant Singh, Narendra Modi, Omar Abdullah, Ahmed Patel, Arun Jaitley, M Karunanidhi, N Chandrababu Naidu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, Naveen Patnaik, Sheila Dikshit, Nitish Kumar, Om Prakash Chautala, Mamata Banerjee, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Singh Badal, Chiranjeevi, Vijayakanth, B S Yeddyurappa, H D Deve Gowda, Digvijay Singh, Murli Deora, Sushma Swaraj, Jairam Ramesh, A K Antony
