Naveen Patnaik: The Greta Garbo of Indian politics

At 11 pm, on a routine day in the early 2000s, the land phone at the residence of the chief medical officer of Capital Hospital rang. It was a call from the chief minister. On a lonely stretch of the Khurda-Bhubaneswar highway, the CM’s convoy had come across two men dragging a young woman along.

Seeing the fleet of cars, the men had fled, leaving the woman behind. The Chief Minister had rescued the woman and, seeing her semi-conscious, had ordered the driver to steer his car towards Capital Hospital. He had walked the woman to the hospital and insisted that he should wait until the CMO arrived. The woman on examination was found to be a sex worker and she was drunk, too. The CM requested the CMO to personally treat her. That she was left alone on a desolate highway in a semi-conscious condition was what concerned the CM more.

That’s Naveen Patnaik for you. “However cold or distant he may appear, he is a person with a kind heart. It is probably why he understands the problems of people better,” says a former IAS officer of the Odisha cadre, recounting the incident.

Not many have seen this softer side of Odisha’s reticent Chief Minister – or the aggressive politician beneath the calm demeanour, either. In political circles, he is known as the refined, soft-spoken and Doon-educated CM of Odisha who speaks less and doesn’t entertain anyone beyond the ritual niceties. In private, he is the recluse who eats frugally, smokes Dunhill cigarettes and drinks Grouse whiskey, as journalist Ruben Banerjee describes him in his recent book ‘Naveen Patnaik’. Among the masses, he is Biju Babu’s bachelor son who lives alone, wears white kurta-pyjama with simple Paragon ‘chappals’, and attempts to connect with them in his broken Odia.

Not a son of the soil

Four terms on, Naveen’s Odia has been the same as it was 19 years ago when he took a plunge into politics following the death of his father Biju Patnaik in 1997. For years, it was a household joke how “Nabinaa” (colloquial for Naveen) pronounced Chandikhole as ‘Chadi khol’ (open your underpants) at a public rally, to the shock and dismay of the audience – an incident that Banerjee also narrates in his book. The critics are more forgiving today, thanks to the state government’s schemes through which Naveen has doled out benefits to the under-priveleged. But his Odia remains the same – broken, accented and read from a transliterated script.

Political observers and journalists say not learning Odia is a strategy of Naveen to maintain the air of exotica that won him public sympathy the first time.  “Odias are notorious for their love for outsiders. Naveen Patnaik knows that, which is why he doesn’t learn the language. If he learns, he will lose his special place as an outsider and become a commoner,” says Sampad Mahapatra, a former NDTV correspondent, now a consulting editor with Otv.

Media academician Mrinal Chatterjee, recalls Ruben Banerjee describing Naveen Patnaik a male counterpart of Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo, known for her reserved demeanour. “Naveen has created a similar mystique around his person. He is not the run-off-the-mill, shrill politician who brags about his lineage. He doesn’t mingle with people, and refuses to speak the language of the land, something a Hindi-speaker can learn in three months. To top that he has this nonchalant demeanor. I feel this is an attribute that has made him endearing to the Odia psyche. A character which could have been a bane for a politician outside Odisha is a boon for Naveen. People may not like Naveen government, but they like him,” he says.

Nurturing no political ambition and away from Odisha most of his adult life, Naveen in his past life had been a connoisseur of fine arts who hosted grand parties, ran a boutique in the Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi, and mingled with the crème de la crème of society. Then, how has a man with no knowledge of the state’s language been in power for close to two decades?

With zero experience in politics and a clean past, Naveen arrived in Odisha, when the Congress government was neck-deep in controversy. The 1980s saw the ‘Illustrated Weekly of India’ publishing an article on the sexual escapades of then chief minister of Odisha Janaki Ballabh Patnaik. The Congress’ image was further dented when in the mid-1990s Anjana Mishra, wife of an Indian forest service officer, alleged sexual assault by Indrajit Ray, Odisha’s advocate general, who was close to JB Patnaik.

Patnaik, who was the CM, came under fire because he didn’t sack Ray. But, when he finally did, the plot thickened. A few days later, Mishra alleged that she was gangraped on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar. She directly blamed Patnaik for the assault.

The burning of Australian missionary Graham Staines along with his two sons by Hindu fundamentalists in Keonjhar, and the state government’s incompetence in handling the devastating Super Cyclone of 1999, erased the final shred of trust that people had in the Congress. “At this time Naveen came as a breath of fresh air. He was unlike any politician Odisha had seen in the past,” says Sandeep Sahu, a senior journalist and correspondent with BBC and Outlook. “He came at a time when senior leaders in the Congress were fighting for the chief minister’s chair. When he visited Odisha’s villages ahead of the elections in 2000, the agonies of the Super Cylone was fresh in people’s minds and they saw him as a new ray of hope,” he adds.

The faith in Biju Patnaik’s legacy was so strong that when the Janata Dal (JD) split to make way for the BJD, many JD leaders who had initially stayed back to handle the party shifted to the BJD in 2000.

Consolidating power

When Naveen joined politics, the soft-spoken and politically ‘inexperienced’ 51-year-old scion was mistaken as the novice who will quietly toe the line of senior JD leaders. “Dilip Ray and Bijoy Mohapatra, prominent JD leaders and close aides of Biju Patnaik, brought Naveen to power. They thought he would be their puppet and they would be the rulers.”

But Naveen humoured them and struck just when they had stopped seeing him as a threat. “In 2000, he cancelled Bijoy Mohapatra’s candidature from Patkura constituency, just hours before the last day of filing of nomination and re-nominated Atanu Sabyasachi in his place.” Mohapatra, who was the chairman of the BJD’s political affairs committee that decided the selection of candidates, couldn’t forecast his own fate. Ruben Banerjee in his book, says during the registration of the BJD, Patnaik, as the party’s president, had insisted that he will have the final say over the cancellation of nomination of candidates chosen by the political affairs committee.

Others who have come in the firing line are Dilip Ray, an influential businessman cum politician who left the party after Naveen withdrew his name from the Union cabinet under the Vajpayee government, and Nalinikanta Mohanty, BJD’s working president and works, housing and urban development minister who in 2001 was dropped without any warning, on charges of corruption.

“He has always cut those to size who have tried to outshine him in the party. Take for example Prafulla Ghadei, who was the finance minister for nine years. Just as he was beginning to be seen as the next CM, Naveen expelled him from the party over anti-party activities,” Sahu says. Ghadei’s expulsion was recently revoked.

His rule with an iron fist is well-known. Naveen didn’t flinch while suspending long-time confidante and political advisor Pyarimohan Mohapatra who allegedly attempted a coup while the CM was away in the UK in 2012. “Dilip Ray who won a Rajya Sabha ticket as an independent candidate later is probably the only leader who has won an election after being dumped by Naveen Patnaik,” Sahu adds.

Baijayant Panda, once a close aide of Naveen, fell out of favour when his questions against the BJD government on social media were too embarrassing for the party. Naveen is notorious for his cabinet reshuffles and introducing new faces to constituencies, much to the chargin of sitting MLAs, MPs and ministers.

Brains behind the man

Recovering lost ground

Nineteen years of being in power has created its own anti-incumbency. A whole generation has grown up with only his regime in their living memory. And the mystique of his nonchalance may be fading. “Naveen was rattled after the BJP won almost 300 seats in the recent panchayat elections. He had been unable to cover all constituencies partly due to complacency and partly due to ill-health. But he was quick to see the writing on the wall and make a course correction. He changed his demeanour and became accessible. Taking selfies with youngsters, visiting bookstores, stopping his convoy to drink tender coconut water or interacting with people isn’t something that Naveen Patnaik does every day, and he has been taking it,” says Sahu.

With several BJD member having shifted loyalty to the BJP in the past few months, Sahu says Naveen may have ruffled a lot of feathers, but it may not necessarily weaken the party’s prospects in the elections. “The candidate becomes irrelevant in elections. It is the chief minister who virtually fights from all constituencies. Apart from an image makeover, the CM has started looking at problems in the party, taking stock of the condition of roads, water supply and pending projects and started goading officers to push his agenda. He has recovered the lost ground to a large extent.”

It appears the Greta Garbo of Indian politics will have the last laugh in the 2019 elections.