JOIN USPatnaik-BJP: Friends, foes, and friends again for 2024?
Though friends turned foes, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Naveen Patnaik-led ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Odisha continue to fight hard against each other in different elections in the state, the growing personal rapport between Patnaik and some of the senior saffron leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has led to speculations in the political circles that the five-time chief minister may consider returning to the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) fold before the 2024 general elections. Assembly polls are also due in Odisha along with the Lok Sabha elections.
Moreover, a number of significant political moves made by the former allies since the last general elections in 2019—including the well-coordinated joint efforts to elect the NDA-BJP nominees in the recently held elections for the posts of president and vice president—clearly indicated that both parties have buried their hatchets and are coming closer to each other again. Analysts, nevertheless, are of the view that an astute politico like Patnaik who also heads the BJD would thoroughly weigh all the pros and cons before taking a final call on as important a political move as going back to the NDA and forging an alliance with the BJP again.
Soon after its formation in 1997, the Patnaik-led BJD joined hands with the BJP to fight elections in Odisha from one platform. After the 2000 Assembly elections, the alliance managed to defeat the ruling Congress and form a two-party coalition government in the state. Prior to that, the BJD had also joined the NDA cabinet at the Centre, headed by the late Atal Behari Vajpayee, after the 1998 general elections, which saw the BJD-BJP combination capture the majority of the 21 Lok Sabha seats in Odisha.
After successfully contesting three Lok Sabha elections and two Assembly polls, the alliance collapsed on the eve of the 2009 Lok Sabha and Odisha Assembly elections after the Patnaik-led regional outfit decided to snap its ties with the BJP and quit the NDA to fight the twin polls in Odisha alone. As expected, the parting of ways was bitter, with both alliance partners blaming each other for the breakup. Though the exact reason behind the political divorce never came to the fore, it was then widely believed that the 2008 Hindu-Christian communal riots in Kandhamal district in the wake of the brutal killing of the Hindu religious leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati led to the fissures in the two-party alliance.
After the breakup, while the BJD has managed to strengthen its position considerably and Naveen Patnaik has virtually emerged as an unbeatable leader, the BJP’s stock in Odisha has gone down drastically.
The first signal that both the former alliance partners have decided to bury the bitter past and are keen to begin a fresh innings for mutual benefits came to light immediately after the 2019 Lok Sabha and assembly elections when union home minister Amit Shah praised Patnaik for his administrative skills to maintain the law and order situation in Odisha properly while launching a scathing attack against Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of neighbouring West Bengal, on the issue of increasing incidents of violence in her state. It came as a big surprise to many as just a few days ago, during the campaign for the twin polls in the state, the home minister had compared Patnaik with a burnt-out electric transformer that needed to be replaced.
After the Union home minister, it was Prime Minister Modi’s turn to praise the Odisha CM for managing the relief work well, while on an Odisha tour to ascertain the impact of Cyclone Phani first-hand. The catastrophic natural calamity, it may be recalled, hit the eastern state just after the 2019 polls were over.
Patnaik reciprocated the gestures in a unique and unprecedented manner. When the time for the next round of Rajya Sabha polls in Odisha arrived, he directed his party’s MLAs to vote for a BJP nominee along with two other BJD candidates to fill up the three upper house vacancies from the eastern state. With its strength in the state assembly, the regional outfit could have easily pocketed all three seats but for Patnaik’s decision to present one to the BJP. Thus, former Odisha cadre IAS officer-turned corporate honcho-turned politician Ashwini Vaishnaw, the present union railway minister, got an opportunity to enter the Rajya Sabha.
It was reported that Patnaik made the unprecedented political move after a telephonic conversation with Prime Minister Modi. The Modi-Patnaik bonhomie was also witnessed recently during the presidential elections, when the Prime Minister decided to go for a consultation with the Odisha chief minister before the NDA announced a senior BJP leader from the state, Draupadi Murmu as its nominee for the post of president.
However, some political analysts are of the view that Patnaik would prefer to continue with the present arrangement of extending support to the BJP when required without formally joining the NDA. For, it allows him to kill three birds with one bullet. He need not vacate seats for the BJP during elections while enjoying the benefits of keeping the Modi administration in good books (central probe agencies that are very active in other non-BJP ruled states are not so active in Odisha). And most importantly, the arrangement also weakens the BJP’s position in the state. Since 2019, the BJP has suffered miserable defeats in all five assembly by-elections, besides the panchayat and municipal elections.